Thirteen

Say what? My firstborn is a teenager? I haven’t quite come to grips with it.

She’ll be starting 8th grade in a few weeks. She’s happy to be at the top of the food chain of middle school. I’m already dreading next year when I’ll have a high schooler. Granted, she’s young for her grade. We could have sent her to pre-K, but we were afraid she’d be bored academically. And we never expected her to be an athlete, so we weren’t concerned about her physically being smaller than her peers.

I mean, look at this little girly girl!

She was such a girly girl that she absolutely refused to wear bluejeans until about third grade. Once, when I was behind on laundry^*, all that was clean was a pair of jeans. I made her put them on, and then she cried and cried and said, “I look like a boy!” So we pulled out the least dirty outfit she owned and she wore that to school.

So can you blame us for never imagining that we’d spend our summer days watching this:

Or our fall days at volleyball meets, our mid-winter days at basketball games, our late-winter days at volleyball meets, our spring days at track meets, and some more volleyball thrown into summer for good measure?

She does still have the girly girl element going on, always tying a cute ribbon of some kind around her ponytail.

She’s a hard worker, a good friend, a gifted singer. We couldn’t ask for a more wonderful daughter. (Yet somehow we lucked out and got 2, but I’ll save that for the other one’s birthday 2 months from today!)

Happy Birthday, Maddog!

And one more just for fun:

^*(I can’t even type that without laughing…yeah, right, just that one time, a long time ago, when somehow I was behind on laundry. What I remember about the day Madeline was born was that we had no clean clothes at home and my mom came over and did hours and hours of laundry and had it all done when we came home from the hospital. And last week, when I wrote about being behind on my laundry, my mom called me up and offered^** to come over and do laundry for me. In 13 years, some things haven’t changed!)

^**(Even though it was extremely generous of my mom to offer to do my laundry, I didn’t take her up on her offer. Because I would have felt like a big loser. Instead I taught Madeline to do the laundry, complete with step-by-step written instructions taped to the wall, and she got it all caught up and saved us. Why doesn’t that make me feel like a loser? I don’t know.)

2 years ago:

Twelve