Aw, man...you guys are awesome. One post and I feel like all "welcome back!".

The girlie's room? Is Pixie Dust Pink and Hobnail Green. Entirely too frou-frou for my taste but she'd had my choice of color on her walls for eight years now and it was time for an upgrade.

And speaking of eight years, my baby is eight years old - as of yesterday. We made our annual pilgrimage to Build a Bear or as my son called it Engineer an Elephant, because that's what she came home with. A big elephant named Marilee dressed in a pink sweatsuit.

She had her choice of dinner and because I am never going to win Parent of the Year - she had an ice cream sandwich instead of cake (for shame! In my defense, I worked all day and had to be back out of the house for a meeting at 5:45 p.m.) and best of all? No birthday candles. I put a tea light (cinnamon scented, even) on top of the ice cream sandwich.

There weren't any photos so I'm hoping I can hypnotize her later into THINKING she had a cake with honest-to-god candles. This will be a birthday that haunts me at Sunday family dinners in the future when my kids come to visit me.

I plan on having our families over for the usual cake and ice cream celebration in a few days so she won't be permanently traumatized. Or she will be but it will be for entirely different reasons.

Like those earrings I got her. I broke my personal 'must be 13' rule and got her ears pierced. Six long weeks she waited. She cleaned them, turned them and counted the days until her birthday when I told her she could take them out and put in a new pair. Which we did without a problem on Monday. She wore new earrings all day and took them out at bedtime.

And that brings us to Tuesday and a whole 'nother story. Her other birthday present? Getting her earrings poked back through half healed earring holes. I mean, it was one freaking night. How could they have almost closed up? And then, after school? We went to check on the earrings she wore and they were kind of, like, stuck in there. The holes had tried to close up with her earrings in. Yeouch.

So my poor babe, all excited for some new sparkly goods, is now half freaked out because we didn't know what to do...put earrings in to try to keep the holes open or leave them out so she's not wearing permanent earrings for the next thirty years. Verdict? They're in.

I hope she likes little flower earrings when she's closing in on forty.