My littlest niece is three.  I can’t believe how fast she is growing up.  Her birthday is always slightly nostalgic for me, though not because she’s growing up so fast (she is!), but because I literally stopped at the hospital to see her on my way to the airport headed for Europe with my sister.  Every year that Kylie gets older, I go through a nostalgic phase about the amazing sister-bonding trip overseas.  It is good that we have entire albums of photos (complete with daily journals) as well as extreme video footage edited down to 5 hours of crazy narrative coverage of our trip.  I knew that would be something I would never regret and, sure enough, now I am so thankful that for the rest of my lifetime, I can reminisce up close and personal our traveling wisdom as well as our traveling bloopers.

Enough with my European/sister nostalgia.  Kylie is three and she reminds me so much of myself.  We had a party for her on Sunday and she became so shy and nervous about all of the attention that she wouldn’t eat a thing, not even cake and ice cream!  Several times, she burst into tears for no apparent reason and, only after much coaxing, could I get her off of her mom’s lap to come sit with me for a while.  Who knew that the save-the-day for her would be a card?

Kevin & I had gotten her a singing card for her birthday.  (I knew that she loved these because I had gotten one for my birthday and she promptly stole it, carried it around the whole night, and sobbed when her dad told her that she couldn’t take it home with her.)  We also got her a new storybook full of tales upon tales of old fables and stories.  (This girl LOVES book like no other!)

Our gift was the last one that she opened up and while she seemed to like everything else, her face lit up when she opened the last card and it started singing, “Boom, boom, ain’t it great to be crazy?”  She proceeded to carry that card around with her the rest of the day and I found out today that she wore it out and now you have to manually trigger the inside of the card because it won’t sing simply by opening it anymore.  (Possibly a good thing as it easily could get annoying after about an hour.)

Here’s my little niece, Kylie, with her wild curls and feisty spirit.  I love her.

Enjoying the music.

“Read me a story.”  “Read me another story.”  Etc.

Kenni, me, and Kylie; these are my only nieces and both are my favorites.