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We had been planning on celebrating Baby's 5th birthday basically since she turned 4.  It was another one of those moments where I looked around our 2-bedroom apartment and thought wistfully of a day in the future when life would return to normal.  I think we were in our new house in Northville all of two days when I started to make plans ;-) We titled the event "Baby's Birthday Bash" and called it BBB for short.  Glo jumped right in, offering to make the invitations (both on the computer and by hand), and when she had those done by the beginning of September, she took on the planning and scheduling of it all as well.  In fact, I contemplated ordering lanyards that could hold our daily schedules (I usually print up a schedule of events, but those aren't always carried around by the family which leads to the inevitable question "what are we doing next?"), and Glo printed up fun daily schedules along with chore assignments.  The family kept thanking me for...

The older I get, the more my childhood feels like a dream.  It really was in a galaxy, far, far away, otherwise known as Texas. Attending All Saints School in Lubbock, I went to school each morning from third through sixth grade wearing a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar, a blue and white checkered jumper, a red sweater, white socks and tennis shoes.  For the church service each morning (I've written about this before), the girls donned a red beret. Every other kid had started at the school in either Kindergarten or first grade, so coming in at the beginning of third grade was awkward in such a small school (catching up in French alone?)  Everyone had their friend groups already established, and I wasn't exactly outgoing.  There was a group of four girls that I wanted to be friends with.  Each morning, they sat around a round wooden table (with a map of Texas lacquered across the surface), and only four people were allowed to sit at the table.  Having ar...