Strawberry's Ninth Birthday!

Strawberry turned 9 this year.  My brain is having a really hard time keeping up with how fast she is growing.  She told me that she only had one more year before she wasn't my baby anymore.  It's sweet of her to let me consider her my baby for this long.  :)  I love that she is getting older though.  It's so fun to talk to her and do things with her that I couldn't when she was younger.  We have started going on dates with each kid and for my last date with her, we went shopping at the mall and then to dinner at Red Robin.  It was seriously like going out with a friend and we had so much fun.  She still has that sweet little girl innocence.  I hope she can hold on to that for a while longer.

Her birthday was fun.  She wanted to have big hair so she had me braid it the night before so that it would be "curly" and she wore her favorite outfit.  I made French toast with strawberries--her favorite breakfast.  She was pretty bummed that she had to go to school that day, but the next day, school was out so we planned her party for then.  We took her out to Outback, her very favorite restaurant, where she got a steak with horseradish crust.  She is always bumming bites off of my plate when I get it, so she knew exactly what to ask for on her birthday.  Mango's favorite part about Outback is licking butter off the bread.  :P

Strawberry decided that she didn't want a cake for both her birthday and her party, so we got some of her favorite cookies and made a birthday pile.  She had the hardest time blowing out the candles.  It was so funny.  She's been doing this for awhile, but somehow forgot how.  It was silly.  She did the same thing the next day at her party and was actually laughing so hard that it took quite a while to get the candles out.

The party was pretty low key this year.  She said she only wanted a little party because she didn't have any friends yet.  My poor little Navy brats.  She did have a couple of friends that she met at church and we actually have some good friends from California who moved here at the same time as us.  It is a lot harder for the girls to make friends when we don't live on base.  Military kids are used to making instant friendships, but civilian kids are a little more settled in their friends and it's harder for the new kids to come into the groups.  It completely makes sense, but it makes me feel like I should have tried harder to live in military housing.

Anyway, it was a fun day celebrating my first little princess.  I'm such a blessed mama with these wonderful little girls filling our lives with sunshine.  It's funny that it has only been 9 years since I became a mom.  It seems like longer, but at the same time, it feels like just yesterday that we went in to the hospital for that first time and came away with a completely new life.  It's been the best 9 years of my life.  :)