Yay for the Birthday Girl

Our Romney turned 15 on August 21. And Troy and I are the luckiest parents ever. This woman is so amazing and talented. She has her share of ups and downs but incredibly she never hates our guts. She was quite the emotional baby/toddler/young girl and during all those meltdowns and freak outs sometimes all I could think about was oh holy crap I'm going to be in so much trouble when she's a teenager. I'm so happy to report that I was absolutely wrong. She is so sweet and loving and loves us and we love her, even when she's having a terrible, horrible, no good. very bad, covid, quarantined, melting-down-teenager day. She's such a gift.

Now normally her birthday happens right when school is starting. Last year I believe she had her birthday breakfast at 5:30 in the morning before I took her to seminary. But, thank you pandemic, school got postponed and she could sleep in on her birthday.

I had fun picking out gifts for her - actually I went nuts shopping for her at Carhartt. She LOVES carhartt overalls and she mostly only wears those. So I went to the Carhartt shop looking for brown ones and couldn't find any but found denim ones for only $20 plus a bunch of other great stuff on the 40%-off-clearance rack. (I may have ended up with a few things for myself as well.) I also got her some fun art stuff from Tabula Rasa. 

The best part of her gifts was that I wrapped a new Carhartt hoodie and addressed it to Troy and even had him open the gift at the birthday breakfast. Romney was very confused. But since her favorite thing EVER is to wear her dad's sweatshirts and sweaters, we thought she would like the hoodie more if it actually belonged to her dad. We are very funny.

Romney has a very sweet and very crafty friend who spent hours making her this amazing stuffy present. I believe it's a character from...something...but I'm old. I have no idea what it's from. But I think it's pretty incredible! It was fun to get a visit from Anna during the day. 

For dinner what she wanted most of all was to go to get sushi with a couple of friends. Luckily we live right up the street from a great little sushi spot so I took the girls there. I tried to be invisible for them while they enjoyed their tasty food but I'm sure I drove them a little nuts. I'm the mom. I can't help myself.

After sushi we went home for key lime pie. Romney prefers that over cake, hands down. We invited the families of her dinner companions. Don't worry, we all stuck to the back yard. It was a really fun celebration for Romney and we especially appreciated that it had nothing to do with school this year.

 

Oh yeah and also, not long after her birthday, Romney had her book 2 cello recital. This is such a huge deal. Romney started taking cello from my sister when she was a 2nd grader. She took her time getting through the first book and not long after that, my sister moved. Romney tried taking from my brother in St. George but the long-distance/skype lessons just didn't work for her and she finally quit. Then at the end of her 8th grade year she realized how much she missed cello and really wanted to go back. We were so grateful when Ariel, who took over most of my sister's students, had an opening for Romney. It was a long tough road for Romney to get back into the swing of things and really learn things the way Ariel teaches them. She got frustrated a few times and came close to throwing in the towel again, but finally got all of Suzuki book 2 learned and she played a little concert to celebrate the accomplishment. Most of those pieces she had already learned with Margaret and/or Peter and had to do some unlearning and relearning. It was painful!

I'm so happy to report that now that Romney is learning all new material with Ariel she is leaping ahead and is loving cello so much. She looks forward to practicing and does it on her own without me asking. (Did you hear me!!?? Miraculous!!)  It's so fun to watch her on this ride.