penny jane is three years old!

(the birthday girl does not understand what you mean by "smile")

(however, she can use herbivore in a sentence, thank you dinosaur train)

we surprised her this morning with legos, some beauty & the beast figurines (she recently braved watching the entire thing by herself and only cried twice!), and a doll bed. requested birthday breakfast: mini poppyseed muffins. requested purple cupcakes: to come at birthday dinner saturday night. hooray! all last night and this morning, and later today i imagine, too, we've been telling stories about what we were doing three years ago. i showed her how i leaned over the windowsill during labor so kirk could push on my hipbones. i talked about not being able to sleep at the hospital. i did not say this part, but the most vivid thing i will always think of, about waiting for that morning in that horrible hospital bed, was the gulping drowning sounds made by a woman in the next room giving birth, and how i cried with relief when she finally gave birth around 4am and stopped making those awful sounds. and three years ago right now i was unhooked from my lines, and my midwife took me down to the cafeteria omelet station for breakfast, yum.