Lucia Turns Nine

Lucia turned nine on Sunday the 10th.

Yes, nine - like Jack said, "halfway to college" - and no, it doesn't seem real that the years have passed so quickly and transformed LuV, a sweet wad of carrot-topped baby, into the smart, spindly third grader with complex opinions and incredible vocabulary skills we know and love today.

We celebrated the big day in Franklin at the Baby House with tasty take-out from the Franklin Chop House and a delicious Coca-Cola cake made by Sis. Over the last week and a half, I've thought about that cake a few times and wish I had just another bite or two of it...

Lucia got a nice haul of birthday presents, including a watercolor I painted of "her" as goalie of her soccer team. That's her favorite position, and Chris says she does really well at it. I didn't have an actual reference photo of Lucia on the soccer field, but I found an awesome shot of Hope Solo and went from there. Lu quickly recognized herself and was tickled to pieces with both the painting and the folding money we stuck in her card.

And because everybody needs a little folding money and to feel special on her sister's birthday, Beatrice got some goodies, too.

And I love that they are so very different from one another - Lucia's kind of an extrovert. Beatrice is neat and orderly. Lucia is (as her mother once described her) "fearlessly creative." Beatrice is cautious and analytical. Lucia is the child who at age three proclaimed a stick-skinny, twentysomething Japanese waiter at a sushi restaurant looked "just like Jack," because he had a ponytail and glasses. Beatrice could get a job with the government identifying the differences identical twins.

As a side note example of how the girls think differently, last year for Lu's birthday, I painted her a card with her lovey on it - she immediately knew it was "KiTTen" and the longer she looked at it, the more similarities she saw. When I did the same thing in April for Beatrice's birthday, she studied the card, and said, "This cat doesn't look anything like Bananas. This cat is brown and has a shorter tail than Bananas. I like it, but it really doesn't look like my cat, Pammy."

I crack up every time I think about it, and objectively speaking as the "artist" who created both pieces, the Bananas card looked a lot more like its subject than the KiTTen one, because I was five months better at painting.