Happy Birthday, My Nine (*gasp!*) Year Old!

Oh child, so wacky, wild, and wonderful you are.

Watching you at play is like marvelling at the puppeteer who lifts hands and angles fingers just so, keeping all the intricate parts separate but working in perfect harmony ("now say that you are the cat and I am the innkeeper and now put this hat on...").

Hearing your stories is like falling down the rabbit hole into the Wonderland that is your mind, abounding with magical creatures and twisty, topsy-turvy plots.

Listening to you singing at the top of your lungs or playing the one piano song you know (Jolly Old St. Nicholas) is like listening to the cosmic dance of the spheres, so joyous is your love of music.

Riding the highs and lows of your hyperbolic assessments ("this is the best French Toast of MY LIFE!!" or "you are the worst mother that there EVER WAS") is like soaring and plummeting along a sine wave of absolutes, with your heart climbing to new heights and then descending to the depths of despair, all in the space of two minutes.

Smiling as your teachers affirm what I already know and tell me how bright you are, how enthusiastic you are, how quick you are, how kind you are, how sweet you are, is like feeling my heart swell and burst over and over with each word.

Smelling your just-washed hair and enclosing your shower-damp body in my arms when we have our nighttime snuggle is like seeing a deer between the trees in the morning mist and knowing that the smallest movement will scare it away, knowing that no matter how hard I try to stop breathing and mentally coax it to stay, no matter how much my soul tries to will the moment to last forever, to breathe don't move...no matter how much I want to hang onto you, as soon as I try, you'll bolt.

It feels like you're already leaving. For the first time ever, my birthday kiss to you must wait until late in the evening - if I even make it to Grandma's by midnight. You'll spend your birthday without me this year, when for the past eight April Fool's Days, I've begun that wackiest of days with an embrace from my darlingest daughter.

And yet, with a spirit as big as yours, it's silly for me to think mere distance can separate us. A girl whose imagination travels to tomorrow and back again in the space of a breath, whose web of words spins signs and wonders, whose song glories to the sky, whose heart enlarges to fit just one more every time you meet someone new, whose mind races and leaps towards each new discovery....

A girl whose lithe body and ever-lengthening limbs somehow still fit into my arms...

A girl like that could never be far from my heart, even if our birthday hug must wait until we are together again.

Happy birthday, most spectacular of daughters. May this year manage to keep up with you.