HAPPY BIRTHDAY

I have been SOOOOO ridiculously busy that I haven’t even had time to do a post about my daughter’s birthday. I’ve been working at the World Travel Market in my new capacity as a “Social Media Director”…..how posh does that sound? I’ve been actually having meetings. I have a business card. It’s all very exciting and exhausting and I’m wondering if I’m too old to run around trade shows having meetings. It’s very tiring you know. I’m going to have to start drinking Red Bull or take glucose tablets pre the show next year so that I don’t do what I did last night – which was not eat all day, drink too much wine and be a nightmare to get home. This is not good in my new professional capacity. I must try harder to be more impressive and less of an old lush.

Anyway, enough about me…..

The least my daughter will expect is another lovely post about how gorgeous she is….because I do it every year and nothing much changes – so I will probably dig it out again. She is SEVENTEEN. A proper adult nearly. All she now wants to do is learn how to drive and buy a car. She amused herself pre her birthday by sending an email from my account to her father which said:-

“Thinking about buying this for her 17th , do you want to split it with me?” and then there was a long link which when you clicked on it pulled up this picture:-

Nice try.

So. I bought her driving lessons and arranged for the first one to be after school on her birthday – she was absolutely thrilled. Then her brother came all the way back from Uni and surprised her which made her cry, as did her friend who came all the way from her boarding school and made her cry even more! Sadly I missed all that because I was still busy trying to get back in time – the Excel centre is bloody miles away and then the trains from Waterloo were all massively delayed because someone had jumped in front of a train and I had to squeeze myself on to a train that wasn’t even going to take me to the right destination and stand with my nose in somebody’s armpit. Really not sure about this commuting business.

We all went out for dinner to her favourite restaurant and my brother appearing was the last surprise of the day and she was, as usual, happy happy happy.

So here is my eulogy to her. I think she’s brilliant. Funny, gorgeous and disappointingly proving to be way more intelligent than her mother. The only other thing she really wanted to be able to do once she was 17 was to give blood which I think is truly admirable. I offered to do it with her but have been in malaria infested territory of late (twice) and couldn’t do it. She instead went off to London and gave blood with her father and then had a birthday dinner with him – fantastic effort I thought…

“Seventeen years ago today I met my beautiful, tall, skinny, funny, confident daughter. She arrived two weeks early and emerged into the world calmly and relatively painlessly, compared to my two boys who fought for days to stay within my body (or perhaps it was my body that refused to let them go). When we met I was astounded. She was so perfect. So long and thin. My heart enlarged a little bit more and as with all my children my heart has subsequently felt as if it spends more time on the outside of my body than on the inside.

She is an almost daily reminder of my youth. She steals my makeup, my shoes, my clothes. She infuriates me sometimes because we are so similar, but there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her and I love her more than she will ever know (ALTHOUGH she has recently majorly pushed her luck by wearing my WORK Ugg boots without permission to a bonfire party and now they are covered in mud and look awful).

Happy birthday my gorgeous girl. I wouldn’t change you for the world”.

How has she grown from this:-

To this. I’d have to go on her shoulders now:-

and here we were together at her birthday meal:-