Happy Birthday, Crafty!

Princess helping with the baby food.

Happy Birthday to you! You live in a zoo! You look like a monkey...no wait...wrong birthday. Although I'm pretty sure the zoo part is appropriate for my house.

Birthdays generally come in pairs at my house. Princess had her birthday on the 24th and today is Crafty’s birthday. She is 11 years old. As a general rule, 11 is one of my favorite ages. Not quite old enough to be an obnoxious teenager, but just right to be helpful and responsible. And that’s my Crafty. Unless it comes to rustling through my craft boxes. Then she loses all sense of right and wrong, leaving boxes open and tipped, glue guns plugged in, and various bits and pieces strewn across the floor. She is an amazing crafter and has been since she was small. She loves to create little creatures and clothes out of whatever she can find. The funny thing is that I have dozens of kits with instructions that she could use, but she prefers to use her imagination and come up with her own creations.

Happy First Birthday!

Daddy made a great horse!

I’ve shared her birth story with you before, and you can read about it here if you missed it. Crafty is our 8th child and we were a bit surprised when she turned out to be a girl. I’m not sure why other than we had done the two girls, boy thing so we were just assuming the same thing would happen with her. We weren’t disappointed; we just had to figure out another girl name. All of our girls are named with the same beginning letter and all of our boys are named with a different first same letter. We didn’t intend for that to happen, we just accidentally fell into it. When we wanted to deviate from that pattern after our oldest five, the kids revolted and said the new baby wouldn’t feel like they were part of the family. They even shed tears over it! So we started looking for another K name.

Crafty was the Poor Nameless Child until about two weeks before she was born. We simply could not come up with a name that met all the criteria. Then one day I stumbled across a name on the Internet and when I ran it by my sweetie, he actually liked it! We were sitting on the front porch at the time and then I said, “But what about a middle name?” He sighed and pointed to the red rose bush climbing the railings of the porch. “How about Rose?” he suggested. “Done!” I said enthusiastically.

Crafty has always been a ray of sunshine in our home. You can see from some of these pics that Princess and Prima Donna spoiled her rotten when she was little. And she was so anxious to become just like them. I’ve told you before that she is an amazing dancer. She loves all sorts of dance, from hip-hop to classical ballet. She will earn her pointe shoes this year and she can hardly wait!

An excellent student, she loves school and she has tons of friends. She is the kind of girl who always wins the citizenship and friendship awards. She recently started playing the clarinet in the school band and she loves to sing. She has been a Girl Scout since she was born (not really, but it seems like it) and she loves to camp and sell cookies (as long as she doesn’t have to go to the door alone).

This is her second year working at a local preschool while she is off track and she is so excited to have a little money of her own. Little kids just follow her around. When she goes into the nursery at church, it is common for some random kid to take her hand and try to get her to join in the fun or read a story. Crafty is a risk-taker and always has been. When she went boating this summer, she was the first one out on the tube. She can walk on her hands and she can use a pair of stilts, two things I was never able to master. She can do the splits all three ways and she loves swimming and cycling. Crafty has a beautiful smile as you can see from this last pic. She makes our home a sunny, happy place. Happy Birthday, Crafty, I love you to pieces.