9.

My daughter turned NINE yesterday. 9!

Her birthdays are always weird because I documented every moment of her life on this blog. I did Wesley’s too, obviously, but since she’s older she represents a larger percentage of my database than he does. I documented the day I found out I was pregnant with her after a year of NO LUCK after pregnancy loss and we had finally “given up” in the sense that we were ready to start trying something medical to help and then BAM. Of course. We got pregnant. If you were ever in the Struggles With Fertility group of society you KNOW how irritating that is because EVERYONE tells you that. “Just quit trying!” and it’s the most upsetting advice every because your spending every second of every day THINKING about how bad you WANT to get pregnant and everyone thinks it’s easy to turn that off? BAH.

Anyway. I documented the entire pregnancy here. The fear that we had lost her when I had a blood clot in my uterus in the first trimester. The renting of the doppler so we could go to bed every night hearing her heartbeat. The preparation as we bought our first house and decorated the nursery. Then the arrival by emergency C-section. We documented it ALL. And now she’s NINE.

Several months ago she asked for horseback riding for her birthday. I told her I’d try to ask around to see if there was a place where we could do that and then she basically forgot about it all together. Of course I found a place and since she had forgotten about asking, we decided to surprise her. We told her we had to go to Barnes & Noble on the OTHER side of town (we needed to explain the drive) and that we would check out this new park while we were over there. We pulled into the farms and she saw people on horses and she said, “WOW! Look! People on horses! I’ve never seen horses this close before. Where’s the playground?”

HA!

We informed her we lied and that we would be riding horses instead and she got SO EXCITED. And then she got SO TERRIFIED. Nikki is very much like me, scared of a lot of things, and I never know the BEST way to handle it because I don’t know how to handle MY fears. They got us on the horses (I was scared shitless too, BTW, I HAVE SEEN GONE WITH THE WIND DAMMIT. Horses are scary!) and we had a little bit of trouble because the horses are SO good about following the pack that sometimes they want to follow a different group. Wesley’s horse followed another group back to the barn when we were trying to leave.

So, Nikki was a bit panicky. Crying a bit and I was a bit panicky wondering if this was the stupidest idea ever. One of the ladies in charge talked to her a bit and reassured me that she’s feel better once we got away from the traffic of the other horses so it was less confusing. We had three great teenage girls riding with us. Once we got going past the confusion of the other horses, Nikki fell into a groove and ended up LOVING IT. She went from tears to non-stop smiles in five minutes. It was awesome.

I relaxed too, never really fell into the “having fun” category like she did because I’m still a big ole’ chicken – but I enjoyed myself because my family was having fun.

All-in-all it was a great way to spend a 9th birthday. For all of us.