Happy Birthday, Mandy!

I can’t believe that my baby girl has turned 30!  It seems impossible; however, Mandy’s knack has always been making the impossible…well, possible.   She even managed to be born on Thanksgiving Day – a special blessing, indeed!

Here I am, ready to leave for the hospital:

She was a big bundle of joy – 9 pounds, 11 ounces and only 19-1/2 inches long!  (I still don't know why they had her dressed in blue.)

She didn’t sleep a whole lot when she was little (so much to do and see, you know), but she was just the most beautiful thing I had ever seen:

It was just the two of us for a while (with Dee Dee right beside us, of course)…

…She was just a few weeks away from turning three when Robert became “Daddy”.

She became a big sister to Alan…

…And continued growing, and doing well in school and just everything that she tried.

There were holidays and parties of all kinds through the years -- she loved dressing up at Halloween!

She did some dancing and singing in the Texas Children’s Choir and Broadway Troop…they even performed at Sea World and at a big military Christmas shindig at Fort Hood:

She grew into a lovely young woman…

…Who graduated high school with honors…

…And graduated from college with honors, too!

And now my baby has a family of her own!

I am so very proud of my daughter and of the woman she has become.  I feel honored to have had the privilege of being with her through the years.  Happy birthday, Mandy!  We all love you!

Even Santa Knows...

...That she is the world's most beautiful child!

This Old Lolee is looking forward to sharing the wonders of the holiday with her special girl!

Trick or TREAT!

For the past several years we have spent Halloween at home, passing out candy to all of the little crumb crunchers.  Sorry to say, this year the little crumb crunchers found that our light was out and there was no one home.  We were with the Lackey family, spending time with the World’s Most Beautiful Trick-or-Treater and her parents.

So what was the World’s Most Beautiful Child dressed up as?  “Super Paisley!”  Most Beautiful’s mother created the character and has some talented lady she found on Etsy execute her design.  Here is that pint-sized super hero:

 As part of her costume, Paisley got her first pair of chucks, which delighted her mother to no end.  This has been Mandy’s footwear of choice for a long, long time.  In fact, when Mandy became engaged to her cowboy, they set up a little website that, if memory serves, was titled something like “Chucks and Boots”.

Jeromy got into the spirit of things by dressing in a costume that also made a statement.  Mandy wasn’t planning on dressing up, but since Most Beautiful did not want to keep her cape (nor her armbands) on, Mandy hoped that if she had a cape too, it might help (it did):

We all attended an event at the church which Most Beautiful’s family attends – it was called “Trunk or Treat”.  A certain area of the parking lot was sectioned off and the trunks of people’s cars became the “homes” to which crumb crunchers went to beg for candy:

There were kids running and squealing everywhere, and it seemed like they were having a good time.  Mandy and I took our girl from car to car and she scored some treats, too, although she couldn’t dive in and eat anything until her parents sorted through it to remove any peanut-laced items.  We did not want to have an Epi-pen event!

This leads me to my one sore point:  Grump-Pa:

Has Grump-Pa (or “Pa Pa”, as Paisley says) ever changed a diaper?  NO!  Has Grump-Pa ever spent the whole day reading stories, singing songs, playing with toys, and making lunch and snack?  NO!  Does Grump-Pa even know how to run the nebulizer and administer breathing treatments, etc.?  NO!   Despite all of that, Grump-Pa is the only thing that Most Beautiful can even see when we are all together.  She was all over Grump-Pa at the party…getting water from the water fountain, riding on his shoulders, and chasing and popping bubbles at the car that had a bubble blower going.  And when she couldn’t have her candy right away, Grump-Pa  took her over to the table with hot chocolate and looted the mini-marshmallows.  Oh the smiles and giggles and adoring looks as Paisley and old-what’s-his-name ate a whole cup of marshmallows together!  It’s enough to make an Old Lolee gag, I tell you!

So that was our Halloween…a little treat named “Super Paisley”!