Happy Birthday to Sissy!

Trying a little something new with the blog, we'll see how this works. This is how Mina's birthday got started today. The video is 56 MB on my machine, so you might want to click it, then go grab a cup a coffee or something while you wait for it to download. Isaac has been very sweet about Mina's birthday all day. The first thing he did when Mina got up was to give her a big hug and say Happy Birthday! Usually Mina is the initiator of their hugs, so this was a special occasion.

11 PM Update: OK, so it didn't work to post a video directly to the blog through Picasa. So instead I had to upload it to the web, so you should be able to get to it through the new photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/arneolson/Spring200702. The video took about half an hour to upload at 330 Kbps, all for about 3 minutes of grainy video. There are some fun pictures though.

Mina has been very excited all week about her birthday, but this morning she was in a rather serious mood. She was happy of course when she woke up -- the first thing she said to me in bed was, in a whispered voice, "Daddy, I'm four!" This morning she opened two presents from Momma and Dadda: the fairies she is opening in the video, and a pretty dress that she loves. I have pictures that I will attempt to make into an album tonight. Then tonight she got another pretty dress, and, what she said she always wanted from the very beginning, a new baby doll! This one is a beautiful little baby doll that she has already named Lucy and said is Lily's sister. She is sleeping happily with Lucy tonight; in fact, the first thing she did was tell Isaac he could sleep with Lily. She would never have done that before tonight. I don't think Lilly has much to worry about, she's pretty much taken over from Waah Baby as Mina's special baby. But it will be interesting to see how things evolve. I suspect there is probably room in Mina's heart for two special babies now. Isaac had no interest in sleeping with Lily, of course, but he did give her a big hug. And he seemed happy enough about being an uncle again to Lucy.

In the afternoon, Meghan made Mina a pink birthday cake with pink frosting! The cake is very yummy, and Mina said she was very excited about it.

I think we're going to have a houseful on Saturday. I'm a bit nervous about it, but what Mina really really wanted was to have all her school friends over to her house, so that's what we're going to do. I'll post more Saturday night after the party.