Family Friday: The Best Teenager In The World

Because I really enjoy the blogging a great deal, but can't craft enough (and suck at cooking too much) to post something I've done daily, Friday will now be Family Friday. I have a fun (and often bizarre) extended family, and an awesome bunch of adopted family-members, so I think every Friday I will report on one of their exploits, or perhaps an amusing memory or two. Call it my memoirs in training.

So! Family Friday The First.

My daughter is awesome. Her friends are also awesome. I (vainly) would like to take some credit for this, as I obviously raised her right enough to have her want to be friends with fun, interesting people, and not go chasing the plastic girls trying to be their lap dog/door mat.

Score!

This past weekend (whilst I was ailing), we had her 13th birthday party. I'd be going "wah, wah, I have a teenager, I'm old", except that she's awesome. Did I mention that?

We did lots of fun things this year. She got to go shopping for cool shirts, got to play princess on her actual birthday (a Saturday this year, how cool was that) by going out with our friend Melissa for a new dress and shoes, and she even went to a salon to get her hair and nails and makeup done. She looked so pretty! (Pictures should be forthcoming, my camera phone wouldn't take anything of quality in the low light of the restaurant we were at, but luckily my alterna-dad's girlfriend had her super-fancy camera with her.) We also surprised her with a trip to her favorite restaurant, Melting Pot. Well, it *was* anyway... 3 hours and bad services seems to have broken the spell.

She also got to have a sleepover...I would have loved to give her a proper party, but what with being broke and saving up for our trip to Chicago in March and all, it had to be a bit low-key this year. She invited 3 friends over for tacos, cupcake decorating, movies and Wii madness. They were up until 3AM, so I'd call that a success. They were also incredibly well-behaved, for which I thanked them profusely the next morning.

The best part was her new Guitar Hero game and guitar. I got it used on Craigslist, which I adore, for 30 bucks. 30 bucks!!! So I figured, yeah it's an ugly guitar, but it was essentially free, so she can decorate it or what have you. She ended up pulling out her vast hoard of stickers, and proceeded to have her and her friends cover it. She also gave them each a section on the back to sign their names and such, and each girl wrote her first & middle name along the edge. Talk about custom! (It looked like this before.)



By the way, those are footie pajamas she's wearing. I told you, she's awesome!