Happy 10th Birthday, Josie!

This is Josie. She turns ten today. She is the greatest gift God ever gave me--she and her sister. Jo made me a mother, and every year I am more and more glad that she ended up my daughter.

She is funny, and tall, and beautiful, and tall, and sweet, and tall, and tender-hearted, and did I mention tall? She's past my shoulder already. She's going to be physically looking down on me in two or three years. Which, considering I'm only 5'5", isn't hard, but I was hoping to hang on to some shreds of authority and dignity for a little while longer.

Josie loves baseball, Spider-Man comics (really, any classic Marvel with Stan Lee's name on it), peanut butter and jelly sammiches, Calvin and Hobbes, swings, cats and dogs, really old Heart, Betsy-Tacy books, sushi, Nancy Drew, drawing, poetry, Alton Brown, sewing, Miyazaki movies, white nectarines and Johnny Cash, not necessarily in that order. She's still wrapping her head around multiplication, but give her time. She wants to podcast. At the store she doesn't beg for junk food, she begs for apples. Apples!

She would be insufferably wonderful if she wasn't also getting her pre-teen crankies on from time to time. So mostly she's just plain wonderful.

Happy birthday, my gorgeous daughter!