The final calendrical first

Edith's first Leap Day.
And her first celebration of Daddy's real birthday.

I'd been trying to make a big deal of this. Nevertheless, when I prompted her early this morning in bed, "Hey, what's today?!" she replied, "Picture Day!" Yep, it was the annual Lifetouch Crying Kids Day at daycare. That hadn't been the answer I was going for, of course, but it's interesting to see that events at school are starting to shape Edith's mental map of the days and weeks.

After that, though, she was very sweet to her daddy all day for his 8th birthday. She repeatedly wished him happy birthday, sang him happy birthday, and told other people about his birthday. She was a trooper when, at her cousins' house for a birthday dinner, she started to complain suddenly that her tummy "felt really bad" and several minutes later, right after Tom blew out the candles, threw up on the kitchen floor. (She immediately was back to her regular self. Her cousin Matthew, whom she hadn't seen in a month, did the same thing an hour before she did. Strange.) When I took her into the bathroom to let her finish vomiting in the toilet and to clean her up, the poor bug said, "It's a shame I threw up on Tom's birthday."

We wouldn't be surprised if her nervous stomach was a response to the stress of a week in which her parents were holding serious Adult Conversations about The Future over her head during all waking moments, putting off requests for stories and songs as long as we could. She hasn't held it against us and even sang us the "I Love Mommy/I Love Daddy" song she learned for Valentine's Day on the way home from her cousins' house. What a sweet kid.