Happy Birthday to Princess Tia

This is actually happy belated birthday to my princess Tia since her birthday was more than a week ago.

I love this picture.  I miss my little Tia with her cute squeaky voice.  Back then a song could make almost any problem all better, and she loved to wear dresses to twirl in.

Even though I miss my little Tia, I love the grown up Tia and wouldn't really want to go back -- except maybe for a short visit!  Tia doesn't have a squeaky voice any more, she has a beautiful one, and a contagious laugh to go along with it.  She is kind, as evidenced by the fact that she is a hair stylist and she never gives me a bad time about how her hair was or wasn't done when she was little.  I was obviously not a hair stylist -- but was all the hair stylist she had -- and nothing I could have done could have kept her from being cute.

Tia is a good writer and story teller.  She is so fun to be with and is great with her little brothers.  She does a really great job as a cosmetologist, and I think she is brave.  Even someone who does a great job occasionally has a client who gets really angry when they don't end up looking exactly like they imagined -- but were not so good at explaining.  That must somehow be made up for by the much more frequent happy clients.  I would dread my job every day if I were her because I would be afraid someone would be unhappy with me -- but she likes her work.

I love that Tia seemed to figure out when she was not very old that it helps to be able to laugh at yourself.  One of my favorite memories is still the piano recital where she played beautifully and then missed the last chord -- and then laughed.  The audience laughed too and I was so proud of her for how she handled that.  It's not always so easy to find humor in messing up in front of people!

Here are a couple of pictures of the birthday celebration that we finally managed to have a couple of days after her birthday.

A song may not make everything all better -- but it still helps.  This book had music with it and beautiful pictures.

Tia loves turtles and the towel is a turtle towel.

My attempt to lean my way out of this picture didn't quite work!

Happy Birthday to my beautiful princess Tia!