Annabelle turned 13 today.

For the last several weeks I teased my first born, asking if she was planning to turn on me the day she became a teenager.

“Eh, maybe,” she replied last week, tossing off one of those looks I used to give my own mother several times a day, long before Resting Bitch Face became an excuse for a bad attitude. I was terrible to my mom for the duration of my adolescence, although it should be noted that for the past several decades, she’s been my best friend, role model and (almost) daily confidante.

I write more about Sophie than Annabelle on this blog — I cut back on AB a while ago, wanting to protect her privacy, but allow me to indulge today, on the anniversary not only of her birth but of a day a surgeon sliced me across the middle, revealing most of my organs to my husband (who didn’t look away quickly enough and is likely scarred for life, and we’re not just talking about a C-section scar) and pulling out a giant, colicky baby. And that was after the epidural didn’t work and that was after more than a day of labor.

Not that I’m counting.

I made a lousy pregnant person, refused to even consider natural childbirth and never did get the hang of breastfeeding. I’d never changed a diaper before Annabelle was born. I didn’t know what to do with her. Or with myself. I chucked my copy of “The Baby Whisperer” against the wall when she was three days old, already a failure, I decided.

But we found our way, Annabelle, Ray and I, and while I’m not at all religious I do wonder if the universe was preparing us for Sophie — a daughter who, in many ways, will never grow up — by making her sister such an old soul.

Annabelle is quiet and kind. She had a recent growth spurt — we almost see eye to eye now — but she’s still among the smallest in her class. This bothers her less than it used to. She is a ballet dancer. She loves to draw. She wants to learn how to surf. She can play Silent Night on the ukelele. She has a giant collection of nail polish, though she rarely wears makeup. She’s the most adventurous eater in the family; the other night she ordered a crazy-huge bowl of Vietnamese soup with who-knows what in it, and slurped it down. Her birthday dinner request: Ethiopian food.

She adores her sister, who loves her back — and also gives her a hard time. Mostly, she doesn’t mind.

Annabelle’s birthday list included items like thread bracelets and a nail care kit, which didn’t seem adequate to mark something as auspicious as entrance to the teen years. She did not ask for an iPhone. In fact, Ray and I were at such a loss for gift ideas that I piled the kitchen table high with hair accessories and baking books this morning, and we each gave her a trip — Ray’s to the Grand Canyon, mine to San Francisco.

She was delighted. At least, she acted that way — and as of 8 am, she hadn’t turned on me. Not yet.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one a little worried about Annabelle becoming a teen. Last night, driving home from Sophie’s swimming lesson, she turned to me and asked, in a small voice, “Mom, even though I’m going to be a teenager tomorrow, will you still treat me like a little kid when I need you to?”

“Yes,” I said, turning my head to hide the tears. “Of course I will.”

Always.

An accomplished attorney named Dick Segal passed away this spring. He had lots of fancy titles and accolades, but to me, he’ll always be Dick Se., father of my oldest and dearest friend.

When Amy Segal and I met in Mrs. King’s second grade class at Hopi Elementary School in Phoenix, it was over a name situation. We cooked up a scheme that would allow us (well, me, mainly — I had the longer one) to avoid writing our entire last names on every paper, every time.

How about Amy Si. and Amy Se.? we asked.

Mrs. King said no. Amy and I bonded over the injustice of it all, and grew up to be two women who fight a lot. (Luckily very rarely with one another.)

We always laughed over the fact that her father and stepmother, as well as my parents, were named Dick and Susan.

And there was one more thing: We both lamented the fact that our fathers were men of few words. Looking back, I’m not so sure that was ever true. Maybe it’s just that Amy and I have such big mouths. Who can ever get a word in edgewise?

If you’ve met either or both of the Dicks, you might beg to differ on the chatty thing. In any case, both are pretty amazing fathers; over the years I’ve seen actions speak far louder than words. I doubt anyone would question that.

At Dick Se.’s memorial service yesterday, a lot of people shared Segalisms. No one shared my favorite:  “There’s a pimple on her but(t) she was pretty.” I get it, it was a funeral. But I’ve always loved that one, not only because it’s a little naughty but because it’s a word play and it’s about looking at things from different angles and arriving at very different conclusions — something I’m sure he did a lot as a lawyer and maybe even as a father.

Listening to Amy’s recollections yesterday, I was struck with how proud I was of my friend, how graceful and wise and beautiful she is — and how proud her dad would be, too. Amy was kind enough to allow me to share her piece here.

When I was 3 years old and my sister, Lisa, was 5, she got to do something that I didn’t get to do. I have no recollection of what it was but, as our dad used to tell the story, I was none too happy about it.  I told him, “It’s not fair!” He said, “Amy, life’s not fair.” And I said, “I know that.  I’ve known that for a long time now.”

The reason I knew that at such a young age is because it was one of the many lessons that he taught us early and often.  He understood that life wasn’t fair so it’s fitting that he devoted his entire career to seeking justice.

He was a brilliant lawyer.  But it’s not something we knew much about growing up.  He was a man of few words and didn’t speak of his accomplishments.  So it was only over the last few weeks that I heard certain stories about his career for the first time.  One of them was about how when colleagues asked him to review briefs, he would often reduce entire paragraphs to one sentence.  I was amused by this because he was no different at home.

When we would ask him to review a homework assignment or a college application essay, he’d get out his pen and say, “Write like a man!”  It didn’t occur to us at the time to say, “Dad!  You can’t say that to your daughters.  It’s sexist and politically incorrect.”  Instead we just took out everything that was superfluous and are still doing that to this day.  But even if we had articulated those thoughts at the time, it would’ve been nonsense directed at him because he was neither sexist nor politically incorrect.   In fact, he was the exact opposite and always brought us up to believe that we could do anything we wanted to do.

Though he was fond of striking out words, he did love them.  He was an avid reader and encouraged intellectual curiosity in those around him.  When we would ask him how to spell something, he’d say, “Look it up!”  And we’d say, “How can we look it up if we don’t know how to spell it?”  And he’d say, “You’ll figure it out.”  And we did.

In addition to reading, he loved to travel, hike Camelback Mountain and cook.  As Lisa said recently, he was a foodie before foodie was even a word.  I recall many weekend afternoons of him making elaborate meals with a football game on in the background.   He loved to eat and he and Lisa would often have lunch at the latest restaurant in Phoenix while he and I would share reviews of restaurants in New York.

Not long ago, there was one in the Times about a new place called Uncle Boons.   Boons is spelled without an apostrophe — even though one belongs there — and the food critic wrote, “Some New Yorkers are offering opinions about the curry while others are still puzzling over the fugitive apostrophe.”    I read this on the subway on the way to work and smiled as I imagined an apostrophe on the run, holding on tight to a subway pole as it high tailed out of town.

I emailed the review to my dad and said, “Who would have thought that the words ‘fugitive’ and ‘apostrophe’ would ever appear in the same sentence, much less next to each other?”  He wrote back almost immediately and said, “In Ulysses, James Joyce describes a man carrying a sign that is part of a letter sequence advertising some Dublin firm.  This man carried the apostrophe.  Maybe that is the one you’re looking for.”

It’s this type of answer that I’ll miss the most.  Dad’s mind housed such a deep reservoir of knowledge and yet it revealed itself in measured and surprising ways.  We all know really smart people who spend a lot of time telling us how really smart they are.  He was not one of those people.  Rather, he doled out wisdom more on an ‘as needed’ basis.   But it wasn’t always what we expected or wanted.  When we would ask him what the meaning of life was or what the purpose of it all was, he’d invariably say, “Wet birds don’t fly at night.”

What does that even mean?  It made no sense to us and we wanted answers.  So we asked the question in different ways — from all angles — hoping to catch him off guard so he’d tell us something more satisfying.  But no.   To the ‘big question’, all we ever got was, “Wet birds don’t fly at night.”  

As young girls, this was a hard concept to wrap our minds around.  As adults, we still have no idea what it means.  And, yet, we know exactly what it means.  He knew a lot but he didn’t presume to know everything and there were some things that he just wanted us to figure out on our own.

As we continue that journey, it won’t be the same without him.  But Lisa and I have decided that whenever the ‘big question’ comes up, we can watch Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life because Dad loved Monty Python and we think that, in his absence, he’d find it perfectly fair for those guys to stand in as his proxy.

It was the 20th anniversary of the original broadcast of an essay that ultimately made Sedaris a household name (well, in my house, anyway) and in many ways launched a whole genre of confessional (true and sometimes not so true) storytelling that is sometimes good, often bad and in a few cases, really ugly. (And I’ll be the first to say that I’ve had my own ugly moments, experimenting with the form. It’s not as easy as it looks.)

But I digress. If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read “Santaland Diaries,” you must immediately Google it and have a listen. Reading Sedaris doesn’t do him justice, and while he’s had some great hits since, this truly is his best work. You will love it, I promise. One thing that struck me, as I sat (okay, hid) in the car and listened Monday morning is how timeless the piece is — a story about what it’s like to work as an elf during Christmas at Macy’s department store. Like the best Christmas classics, it’s all as true today as it was 20 years ago.

The last excerpt really hit close to home for me.

Tonight, I saw a woman slap and shake her growing child. She yelled, Rachel, get on that man’s lap and smile or I’ll give you something to cry about. Then she sat Rachel on Santa’s lap and I took the picture, which supposedly means, on paper, that everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be, that everything is snowy and wonderful. It’s not about the child or Santa or Christmas or anything, but the parents’ idea of a world they cannot make work for them.

Ah, I thought, that was 20 years ago. What about today, where sharing our kids’ images and quips has become a competitive sport? Again, I’ll be the first to admit my own guilt. And I’ll admit that I totally related to what Sedaris said: I’ve never actually slapped one of my children, but I have on occasion begged, cajoled and threatened both girls before snapping that photo and wiping away the tears with an Instagram filter.

Not this year. Not on Christmas morning, anyway. The Friday before Christmas, Sophie pulled a shirt over her head without first removing her glasses, leaving herself with a very shallow but very large and nasty looking scrape just below her eye. No photos for us. I was bummed — of course I wanted the perfect shot of Sophie ripping into her Monster High long underwear — but I must admit the lack of a photo op forced me to savor the moment just a little more.

The day after Christmas, the scab fell off; and the picture-taking resumed. Habits die hard. Anyhow, I thought to myself this morning as I bribed Sophie with hair products so she’d let me snap her picture during a bang trim, David Sedaris doesn’t have kids. He just doesn’t get it.

In any case, it’ll be a while before I take a photo of the kids without thinking of him.

“Do you love your sister?!” Sophie asked the other day, out of the blue.

“Um, yeah, of course I love Aunt Jenny,” I replied.

“Tell her!”

Hmmm. That might be tough. The only time in recent memory the phrase “I love you” was used in conversation with my younger sister, it was at the end of a phone call and I can’t recall which of us said it but I do remember that we both burst out laughing — because it was an accident. While we both end every conversation with our mom and our respective husbands with “I love you,” we don’t say it to each other.

Not for any particular reason. We just don’t. It’s not us.

But it is Sophie. She’s the Love Nazi.

“Say, `Hello beautiful mother,’” she says as she hands me the phone, after giving my mom instructions to greet me as ‘beautiful daughter.’”

It’s not like we’re not an affectionate family — it’s just that as a rule, Sophie is pretty much exploding with love. The rest of us are a bit more subdued. Exhibit A: the picture above, of Sophie and her best friend Sarah. Sarah looks pleased, if slightly panicked (it’s understandable, for a tiny person Sophie has a scary-tight grip) by this run-of-the-mill show of affection.

It’s cool. Who couldn’t use a love explosion once in a while? The other day, Sophie told me she loves me more than her birthday. That’s big. (I’m not sure she means it, but hey, I’ll take it.)

Don’t get me wrong — it’s not “The Love Boat” 24/7 around our house. Sophie can be just as pissy (sometimes more) as the rest of us. But a lot of the time, she reminds me of the title character in my favorite Christmas movie, “Elf.” (“I’m in love, I’m in love and I don’t care who knows it!”)

I can’t wait to dance at her wedding.

Sophie does have one habit I’d like her to break.

She waits til I’ve just drifted off to sleep, then she puts her face right up next to mine, and kisses me gently on the lips. In Disney movies this looks so pleasant, but trust me, when you open your eyes from the throes of a gentle slumber and there is another set of eyes looking right into yours (from a distance of a few centimeters) it scares the shit out of you.

Out of me, anyway.

A small price to pay for all that love.

If you know me at all (and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here once or twice) this might sound strange, because I have had a fish phobia pretty much my entire life. As in I will not eat fish (or anything that comes “from the sea” — and that does include fresh water), I will not touch fish, and I do not like looking at fish. Not when you can tell what it is, anyway.

In almost 46 years, I’ve made so few exceptions I can count them on two hands. I’ll choke down a few bites if you invite me to your house and serve me fish and I really, really like you. I’ll eat shrimp if it’s wrapped in several layers of fresh Vietnamese spring roll. And I’ll stick my toes in the ocean — but just my toes.

Do not expect me to get excited for Shark Week; don’t put a shrimp head in a bowl of soup in front of me; in fact, don’t even leave an old paperback copy of Jaws around. I’ll have to turn it over so I can’t see the cover. Just the thought makes me shudder.

For most of my life, this phobia was fairly easy to indulge. Then I had kids — and pets. Years ago Ray stuck a big tank with about a billion fish (ok, maybe half a dozen) in Annabelle’s room. He cleans and she feeds and I avert my eyes. It works okay. (It’s better than a snake.)

Two Chrismases ago, Santa brought Sophie a fish. I thought this was a big mistake (big surprise) and told Ray so. “What if it dies? What if she kills it? What if she doesn’t care about it?” I asked. “It’s just a fish.”

But Ray knew she’d love it, and she did. He bought a Beta, which meant there would only be one fish in Sophie’s life. I thought it was pretty horrible that our sweet daughter would own a pet with a strong instinct to rip another fish apart in seconds, but I figured the alternative was a whole tank of fish (or a snake) so I kept my mouth shut.

Sophie was thrilled with her new pet, and knew exactly what to name her: “Sophie the Fish.”

I heard that, and an icicle cracked off my frozen heart. Maybe this fish thing wouldn’t be so bad.

And it wasn’t. Ray helped Sophie take care of her fish, and I averted my eyes. After a few months, sometimes I’d sneak a glance at her. And after a year or so, I was actually stooping, once in a while, to examine her. She wasn’t so bad — bulgy eyes, creepy mouth, but her teeny tiny fins were actually sort of cute. She was purple-blue and lived in a tank with a purple castle and plastic purple plants and Sophie the Girl loved to talk to her, to turn her light off and on and to make sure to send her regards via our pet sitter when were out of town.

One day I walked by the tank and didn’t see Sophie the Fish and to my great surprise, I was actually a little upset. Ray assured me he’d been keeping an eye on her and that sometimes she hid at the bottom. I was happy to see her emerge.

Months went by, and Sophie the Fish would come and go and then one day I realized it had been a really, really long time since I’d seen her, so I pressed Ray on it. For a few days he told me he was pretty sure she was hibernating. And finally he admitted she was gone.

“GONE?!” I asked. “You mean she died and you scooped her out and YOU DIDN’T TELL ME? What are we going to tell Sophie?!”

It was a little more complicated, he explained. Sophie the Fish had disappeared.

“I think we better start keeping the cat out of Sophie’s room,” he said.

Oh.

Nothing a trip to PetSmart won’t fix..

Sophie the Fish II is now happy in her new tank, and Sophie the Girl never noticed. Ray felt really guilty not telling her, but I think in this case a little deception is okay. Last week Annabelle confronted me point blank and I admitted to being the Tooth Fairy; that’s enough honesty for me for a while.

Plus, Sophie II looks exactly like Sophie I. I know this for sure because these days, I kind of enjoy sneaking into Sophie the Girl’s room and hanging out around the fish tank. Go figure.

And a tiny bit relieved. But mostly upset. For as long as I can remember, Sophie’s begged for a baby of her own. (I did a piece about it for KJZZ/NPR in 2007.)

We have dozens of baby dolls around the house, everything from the Itty Bitty (or whatever it’s called — the price certainly isn’t) from the American Girl store to several Walgreens specials. Including Bob.

I have dubbed Bob “the scariest doll in the world.” He (or maybe she) is the most basic, old school, crappy baby doll ever — and thus has not held up to the wear and tear of our household. Bob has been stitched back together many times in a series of sewing lessons (mostly that Annabelle has given herself, some from our Super Nanny, Courtney). At one point he/she wore a jaunty fleece shirt and hat Courtney sewed; that’s disappeared. (Why do ALL the dolls in our house end up naked?)

Looking back, a pattern has emerged.

The other day Sophie marched into the bathroom waving Bob, who no longer had a foot.

“What happened?” I asked.

Sophie mimicked yanking the foot off.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Courtney will be here soon. That can be your project for the day.”

Sophie didn’t seem at all concerned. Two nights later, she let loose with the “kids are too much work” line. It was still bothering me this morning, so a few minutes ago, while Ray was toasting her an English muffin and I was waiting for the caffeine from my first Diet Coke to kick in, I brought it up again.

“Sophie, you really don’t want to have kids?” I asked. (Knowing I should leave this one alone.)

“No.”

“Why?” Ray asked.

“Because they cut your stomach open.”

Ohhhhhhh. I looked at Ray.

“Oh yeah,” he said, looking a tiny big guilty. “I was showing Sophie her birth pictures the other day.”

“HER WHAT?!” I practically spewed soda across the room.

“Don’t worry, you can’t see anything! You’ve seen those pictures!” (I have NOT. I do not want to know anything about that whole C-section scene, let alone see pictures of it, in the case of either of my daughters.)

Okay, well that explains some more.

And for the record, yes, I know all about the challenges of having a child when you have Down syndrome. And I’ve given up (almost) on the idea that Sophie will have babies.

I just wasn’t prepared for the fact that she’s given up.

Many years ago, my colleague Paul Rubin profiled a local pediatric cardiac surgeon for our paper, Phoenix New Times. The headline was “Prince of Hearts.”

But to me, it’s Paul who’s the prince of hearts. Maybe even the king.

You should read his article about Michael Teodori. It’s a wonderful piece of journalism, well written and the result of months (literally) of reporting. It is not a story, pardon the pun, for the faint of heart. I am, and although it’s been almost a decade since the piece was published, I can still remember standing in the doorway of Paul’s office, wincing as he tried to tell me what it was like to watch the doctor literally hold a baby’s heart in his hand.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I said, covering my ears and waving my hands to make it stop. I just couldn’t go there. I had a one-year-old and (although I didn’t know it yet) another baby on the way, and I simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a child with a serious medical problem, let alone one requiring open heart surgery.

Less than a year later — days after Sophie was born — I called Paul.

“Hey, you know that heart surgeon you profiled?” I asked. “I need his number.”

Paul didn’t just give me the doctor’s number. He called him personally. He assured me this particular procedure was the simplest these surgeons performed, talked me through the whole thing — several times, although I never did understand just what they did to Sophie’s heart. (Defense mechanism.) Four months later, on the day of the operation, Paul left work to come to the hospital and visit the nurses he’d gotten to know in the pediatric ICU, making sure they’d give Sophie extra-special care. He sat with us in the waiting room, and when Ray and I were able to see Sophie, he stayed behind and waited with my parents. At one point I looked up, and my dad was standing by Sophie’s bed. I was shocked; my father’s not the type to hang out near  medical tubing and bloody incisions. Paul had convinced him to come in and see her.

Nobody convinces my dad to do anything. But nobody had told Paul that.

By the time Sophie needed her second heart operation, at age 4, she and Paul were great friends. Post-surgery, she was understandably cranky, and pushed most visitors away. Not Paul. For months he told the story about how Sophie reached up from her hospital bed, grabbed his finger, and refused to let go.

Lots of people pass the Sophie Test, but few with the flying colors of this guy. When she sees him she goes nuts, and has announced on more than one occasion that she intends to marry him. (Awkward for his current wife.)

Don’t get me wrong. Paul is no saint. In the nearly 20 years we worked together, I wanted him dead on more than one occasion. He can be stubborn, and tact is not always his strong suit. I’ll never forget where I was standing the day he told me a cover story I’d just written was the worst thing he’d ever read in our paper. (An insult I’m still not quite ready to admit as true.)

But I also remember every rare, hard-earned compliment — including last week’s, when he told me how much he likes reading my blog. (It should be noted that when I started this blog, Paul cringed and made faces at the mere idea.) In the last 20 years, the guy has defended me against bullies and bitches; taught me a lot of what I know about journalism; introduced me to trusted sources; and brought me back documents from the courthouse on the hottest summer days. (And if you’ve ever been to Phoenix in July, you know that’s a big deal.)

We joked often that in all our years in the same office, we’d rarely been to lunch together; we were both too busy. But when I needed him, he was there. And he was there for Sophie.

This week, Paul cleared out his office. Even though I’m on the other side of the building, and never could hear his phone conversations or his jazz music, somehow the place feels quieter now. I walked by his mailbox and noticed there’s still a box of Thin Mints in it, a purchase he made from my girls back in January. He doesn’t eat that kind of thing — the biggest treat I’ve seen him allow himself is one Hershey’s kiss from my candy jar, almost every afternoon — but he bought a box of Girl Scout cookies every year when the girls walked around the office with their order forms.

I’d always tell him not to, offering to erase the order after Sophie had sweet talked him — she’d never know the difference. But he’d always insist, saying he wanted to do it for the girls.

He’s that kind of guy.

Apparently F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, grew up and wrote for The New Yorker and The Washington Post — and avoided her parents’ mental illness. Sounds pretty good to me.

And so here is Fitzgerald’s advice to Scottie on her 11th birthday, in the form of a letter written in 1933, list of things to worry about (and things not to worry about).

Happy birthday, my sweet Annabelle. My advice: Don’t worry about a thing. Stay just as you are — loyal, wise, beautiful and independent. But if you insist on worrying, check out this list from one of my favorite authors.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

After exhausting my sister’s brilliant idea that began several years ago with “40 Things We Love About Aunt Amy,” we’d run through the whole family (our mom included) and desperately needed a new schtick.

Enter the Mamafesto. A while back, my dear friend Jill wrote a brilliant manifesto for a writing workshop. I wrote my own, Jackalope Ranch is now doing a series — the manifesto has arrived.

So why not a Mamafesto? You know, all the good advice (well, the advice that’s fit to print) your mom has given you over the years?

With no further delay, here it is, a birthday present to you, Mom, from Jenny and me. And thank you. We’ve learned a lot — so far.

1. Always announce that you have a big butt (even if you don’t) before anyone else can say it about you first.

2. It’s perfectly acceptable to start the day with a Diet Coke.

3. It’s okay to refuse to get in the pool until the water temperature is 90.

4. Eating Brach’s by-the-pound candy while walking through the grocery store is not stealing, as long as you tell the clerk to lean on the scale a little when you hand her the wrapper-filled bag.

5. Birthday celebrations cannot be too big when it comes to your children.

6. Half birthdays deserve to be celebrated, too.

7. Shoulder pads are always in style.

8. Santa Claus does not discriminate against Jews, but don’t expect anything more than Trident gum from the Easter Bunny.

9. If you are going to fast on Yom Kippur, be sure to eat breakfast first.

10. When you don’t have a coffee filter, toilet paper will do.

11. When buying gifts, purchase one large, lovely thing — instead of a pile of crappy little things.

12. The best Christmas song of all time is and always will be “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”

13. They call Scrabble a game, but it’s very serious business.

14. Democrats are better than Republicans.

15. It’s more important to be creative than to be organized.

16. A little green fuzz on the raspberries never hurt anyone.

17. You can’t please everyone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

18. If you feel like your neck is sagging a little, put on a birthday hat. The elastic under your chin will do wonders.

19. You can never tell your kids too often that you love them.

20. The show must go on.

Dear Sophie:

Happy birthday! I cannot believe that you are 9 today (even though we have been talking about your birthday for months) and some days, I cannot believe that I am your mom. Or that I am a mom at all. I am so lucky. Also tired and exasperated — and sometimes not as nice as I should be. But more than anything, I am happy. I love you, my beautiful girl. I hope you know that. Just in case, in honor of your birthday here are nine things I love about you (a twist on our family tradition):

1. I love your butt. I cannot believe that I created a person with such an awesome butt. (Daddy and your physical therapist do get some credit there.)

2. I love that you love Chinese food as much as I do.

3. I love that when you are dancing on the big stage, you always make sure to give a little wave.

4. I love to watch you run.

5. I love that you seem to know instinctively when somebody needs you to crawl on their lap.

6. I love listening to you sing Adele songs.

7. I love that you tell me, “Mommy, I love you too much.”

8. I love falling asleep with you — and waking up with you, too, even though you are a morning person and I am not.  

9. I love that even though you were disappointed this morning that you didn’t get McKenna, the American Girl doll of the year, and even though we didn’t have time before school to go out for bagels or play a board game, and even though I couldn’t find the purple dress you wanted to wear and we were out of Carnation Instant Breakfast and I wouldn’t let you call your best friend at 6 a.m., you still told me it was “the best birthday I ever had” after I let you get extra whipped cream on your Starbucks drink.

And I love the fact that even though you aren’t on Facebook, everybody seems to know that it’s your birthday. 

I cheated — that’s 10. One to grow on.

P.S. Happy Birthday to Girl in a Party Hat. She’s 4 today.