Margaret turned three last week, I keep telling people she's four and Chris keeps correcting me. She's three, just three--although she's already attained verbal capabilities that our male children don't generally have until age five. For her birthday she requested one pink balloon and one small pink cake so that she wouldn't have to share them with anyone else. We did get her pink balloons and a pink cake but unfortunately there were enough of both for everyone to have some.
I suppose a girl can't have everything on her birthday.
Having no experience in pink birthday cake baking I called in Rosie for her perfect pink cake recipe and it turned out wonderfully. Not quite as good as it probably would have been if I had made it all by myself, but I'll take an imperfect cake that I got to make with my daughter (while wearing matching pink mother-daughter aprons!) over a perfect cake that did not have a middle layer glued back together with icing any day.
She loved all of her presents, especially Big Little Baby, so named because she is bigger than her littlest baby though not quite as large as her big baby. None of the children has ever been particularly imaginative when it comes to naming their toys and it would appear that Margaret is no exception.
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We spent most of her birthday weekend just us girls (plus the baby), since the boys were out camping with their Cub Scout pack. We baked her cake, went out visiting, and I got to introduce her to my own childhood love--Shirley Temple movies.
She was properly impressed.
I loved having a girls weekend with mostly just us two but it also reminded me of her sisters and the fact that they weren't there with us. Her birthdays tend to do that in general--I think it's the pink explosion that generally comes with them. Margaret's birthday actually falls on the day devoted to remembering pregnancy and infant losses so all during the day every time I peeked on my social media feeds I got bits of encouragement from women who were also missing their babies. God's timing is good.
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