maria's 20th birthday

It started out with us up at the lake.  The kids wanted a picture of this.

They'd named this person, "Handgela."

Aww.

Everyone was here for supper tonight, and it was a great, wild, loud night.

 The only picture of t.c. is him second to the right, in the aqua shirt.

Enjoy that.

They went into the bins of costumes and dressed as Power Rangers, and also a tiger in velour.

 He's just not sure what's wrong with them.

 He's doing Power Ranger growls.

 This cake was baked up at the lake, an innocent chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, transported safely back to the city.

Then they decided to decorate it.   Moose. Bats.  They claimed they washed all of it first and dried it.

Fine.  Maria?  You're a lucky girl.

 Those two:

 And these two:

 Gifts, blurry, blurry:

 Here's Maria and her buddy, him yawning.

 And now, not yawning, just blurry.

Cake time!

Joe is thirty.  Maria is twenty.

 Julia and Heather:

 After cake, Halloween toys:

 Mist machine:

 

Maria requested for her birthday supper tater tot casserole or tortellini soup.

Pssht.

Why not both?  We had both.   There was a huge kettle of soup and a huge pan of tater tot, and a giant salad and a big fat chocolate cake, and Dannell brought homemade rolls, and apparently this crowd was hungry tonight.

There's a little left in the fridge, but not much.

Here'a Maria, back in the day with her stuffed dogs.  They took up the entire upper bunk.

 

 Here she is getting teased by her brothers:

And here's a picture I love mostly because there you are, right in the middle in a beautiful, fancy dress I ordered from a company that no longer exists.   Kari is a baby in this picture, so Tim and Julia weren't even here yet.

But there you have always been, right in the middle.

Today at 2 pm, I teased you about this--on the day you were born, Heidi and Kirsten had to go to a birthday party at 2, so I finally had my baby to myself.

The girls had spent hours unwrapping and re-wrapping you in the bed beside me, brushing your hair, passing you back and forth, looking at your toes, putting socks on and off.

Maria today: "They're not doing that tonight."

When you were about five, there was a magazine cover of a doctor holding a screaming baby upside down. He was wearing a hazmat suit and the baby was naked and very distraught.

You looked at that and said, "When I got born, my dad didn't scare me."

We were in line at the grocery store, and I stared at you.  What could you possibly remember about that morning?  

It's true.  There were no masks or gloves.  Dad was careful.  We didn't hold you upside down.  As I remember, you were all kinds of beautiful and the rest of us ate Halloween candy in bed.

The day you were born was actually a pretty great day.  Little Jay was a tall, lanky, bald-headed toddler, and he didn't know what to think of the situation.

And having you for a girl has been a whole lot of fun.  First of all, you're such a reactor, an over-reactor even.   Get Maria going is a whole lot of entertainment for the rest of us, "Listen to her go."

But not tonight. Tonight you were peaceful and we let the loud party racket all around us.

Maria?   Twenty years now it's been fun being your mom.

I think the next twenty probably won't disappoint either.

Thank you for being my girl.  In this whole world, there is nobody I love more. 

love forever, MOM (and DAD, and everybody)