Twelve

My McKenzie.

I've embarrassed myself recently with how much I talk about this girl.  I can't help it though.  She's just so amazing.

So amazing.

The other night as Brian and I were getting ready for bed, the topic of McKenzie came floating into our conversations.  (Side note: Now that I know just how much parents talk to each other about their kids, I would be fascinated to be able to go back and listen to some of the conversations my own parents had about me throughout the years.  Wouldn't that be interesting?)

"I am so impressed with McKenzie lately," I said. "I don't even know how to put it into words, but... she's... she's... ..."

"She's a good kid," Brian helped.

"Well, yes... but it's more than that," I said, still searching.  "She's... an Amazing... Person."

Brian was silent for a couple of seconds, and then started nodding his head in agreement as the weight of that subtle change of words sunk into his heart.

She is.  She is an amazing person.  You know how when you hold an unlit firework in your hands and you can't believe that something so small can create such a big and powerful explosion?  That's how I feel about McKenzie.  She is packed with so much potential that I believe she really could do anything.  (Except maybe map her way through jungles and deserts, or towns and cities, or home from her piano lessons that are less than a mile away. She has a terrible sense of direction.)

She turned 12, you know.  Twelve years old.  It's a big age for us because this is the age that she steps from the children's organization of our church into the youth organization... this transition provides for me a measure of tangible evidence that she is, indeed, growing up and entering into the wonderful and confusing world of adolescence. For so many years she has been traveling along Child Road, learning along the way the whos and whats of life: who God is, what she is doing here, what kindness feels like, who she is, what sharing is, and caring is, and honesty, and faith, humility, service, punctuality, trust, love...

She has traveled well and has learned much.

But now she finds herself at a bend in her road, standing beneath an old road sign with one wooden stake pointing the direction from which she came and the other pointing the direction to which she faces. One marked CHILD, one marked YOUTH.  Along this new road she will find that her lessons are much more focused on the whys and hows of life: how to be faithful, why one must have charity, how to be compassionate, why she should strive for honesty and humility, how to deal with disappointments, why one should be hopeful and grateful and prayerful...

She will travel this one well, I'm sure, and will learn much.

She has a lot of helpers to lovingly guide her along.

The night before her birthday, she and Grandma snuggled up on the couch and Grandma told her all about the memories she had of McKenzie's first few hours and days and weeks and months of life.  It was a truly beautiful moment.

Brian and I, on the other hand, decided to go the fun route, and decorated the outside of her door once she was asleep.

The next morning (on the special day of February 4th) she came down to a table full of love... actually, she came down to two tables full of love. The one pictured above with love in the form of gifts and decorations, and the one in the dining room with love in the form of a delicious breakfast and seven happy people, pumped and prepped and ready to celebrate her life.

Once she was off to school, I set to work making her delicious mint ice cream and Oreo cake which took me a few hours what with the shopping and the crushing Oreos into fine crumbs and all.  But soon it was finished and ready to be put into the freezer.

Somehow this happened.  The entire blasted thing toppled from my hands and landed face first onto the mat in front of the freezer.  I almost cried - but then I remembered that it was just a cake and that I had nothing better to do than to spend a few hours re-buying all of the ingredients and making it all over again (ahem).  I took this picture to show my mother-in-law (who was feeling quite sick on the couch but was reading to Timothy anyway), and when she saw it she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Just put it all back in the pan. I won't tell anyone, you won't tell anyone, so no big deal," and when she saw the horrified look on my face added, "well, that's what I would do anyway, but if you'd like to make it all over again, you go right ahead."

Actually, I didn't want to make it all over again...

Everyone said the cake was delicious, and I would like to point out, completely unrelated, that no one got sick in the week after McKenzie's birthday.

The evening was lovely.

In the last few slivers of sunlight, Grandpa gave the boys a few basketball pointers,

and McKenzie closed them out reading.

We had a delicious birthday dinner of home grilled steak, baked potatoes and corn (McKenzie knows how to pick them), and then we sat down around the breakfast table to open presents.  We sat, and sat and sat, waiting for McKenzie who was behaving far too much like a teenager for my own liking:

Feet up in the air, talking on the phone.  Thankfully it was to her Aunt Michelle and Uncle Jake and not to her boyfriend (to be clear, she doesn't have a boyfriend), but still... feet up in the air?!

After talking to Michelle and Jake, she got another phone call from Uncle Brian.  So we waited some more.

Eventually she joined us and the unwrapping was a success.  She's getting good these days.

Brian and I gave her a trip to San Francisco, just the three of us.  One of her favorite gifts ifIdosaysomyself.

Following the presents, we all hopped into the van and drove to the gym where we watched her play a great game of basketball.

Some of our party was bored, but they were all good sports.

The following day we finished off her celebrations by inviting twelve girls over for pizza, minute to win it games, and cake.

It was nuts.

With the dining room full of girls (and Timothy), the boys were shoved to another area to eat their pizza.

Happy twelfth, beautiful!