Happy Birthday to Tres

This week we celebrated a milestone: Tres's fourth birthday, and the first magic (aka golden) birthday in our family, defined as the year one's age coincides with the date she was born. Uno will have hers at 13; Dos will have hers at 26; Cuatro has to wait until she turns 29. (DH and I had ours at ages 3 and 7, respectively, but I guess we didn't know how cool it was at the time. I actually spent most of my 7th birthday stuck in the middle of the desert somewhere between Portland and Boise next to our broken down 15-passenger van. As I recall, it was neither magical nor golden. But I digress.)

Because it was her once-in-a-lifetime magic birthday, I wanted to give her something special -- but I didn't know what. Something lovely and meaningful and important, but something a newly minted 4yo would be excited about. Also something not too pricey, LOL. (In a family of this size, we have to consider precedent!) I actually finagled an afternoon by myself and wandered Toys R Us for a couple hours (this after trolling the web every nap time for days in a row), but nothing felt like the right thing. The giant, elaborately decorated solid wood doll house would have been nice, but the $300 price tag was out of my league. Dress-ups might have been cool -- and you'd think I could have found some good ones, given that her birthday falls in the month of Halloween -- but everything they had looked flimsy and cheap (while simultaneously not being as cheap as you'd hope). In the end, I came home slightly unsatisfied with a plastic Dora the Explorer castle plus a few extra figurines to go with it. Not grandiose, not important, not something so special she'll remember it for years to come....

Of course, one of the things I've always loved about Tres, ever since she could talk, is her vocal and exaggerated gratitude. Every present she opened -- the Dora castle, the off-brand princess Barbies from her sisters, clothes from DH's uncles, an art kit from SIL -- she declared the best ever, her most favoritest thing in the whole wide world, a real life dream come true! "Oh, how did you know?" she'd ask while clasping the gift to her chest. "I love it with all my heart! This is the best birthday I ever had!" And because of some family drama that the girls (except for maybe eavesdroppy Uno) know nothing about, we got to have several birthday celebrations over the course of three days (certain people refuse to be in the same place with other certain people, and some otherwise uninvolved people feel compelled to pick sides and meanwhile I'm just trying to be Switzerland and let innocent little Tres share her day with all the people and it's just a big fat mess). The upshot of which is that just about everybody came away thinking that their gift was her favorite because they didn't hear her say it about every other gift. But really it's true; she loves each of them the most, like a mom loves her kids: Not the most in a ranking from one to whatever, but the most in terms of capacity. It would be impossible for her to love them each even a smidgen more than she does because her heart is full to the point of exploding.

Kaboom. :-)

We topped off the days of celebration with a series of photo shoots, which does fit the meaningful bill a little more than a plastic castle. Usually my girls hate when I try to take their pictures, but Tres allowed me to do it (and even asked if she could do it again after our first session!) because it meant she could wear lipstick (aka chapstick or clear gloss). The photo up top and these below are a few of my favorites (the pics of her in the pink fairy dress and the white dress were taken a few days before her birthday; the ones of her in blue were taken the day after).










And one of all my girls, just for fun:




~RCH~