Look who's twelve!!!

Hannah is a responsible, organized, smart, beautiful, level-headed, quick-minded, bibliophile.  We love her dearly and are so blessed by her honesty and obedience.  She turned twelve two days after Thanksgiving this year.  It doesn't feel like I've been a mother for twelve years at all.  Time has gone by too swiftly for my liking.

We gave her a massive colored pen set with a leather case that has a bunch of zippered compartments and a Mark Kissler drawing book.  My parents gave her the Mother-Daughter Book Club series which she's reread a zillion times already.

Her sister used her own money to get her a giant canister of Jelly Beans. It has certainly been a favorite gift.

This girls loves getting presents!  I've never seen her smile so much.

The Emoji Cupcake Disaster

Hannah and Genna have email accounts since this summer to keep in touch with their friends from Maryland.  They have had a lot of fun with emojis and so when I saw an idea for Emoji cupcakes on Pinterest, I thought it would be easy and fun.  I asked her if she wanted to help me make them and learn how to decorate with icing.  She did, so I determined in my mind to let go of my perfectionism and just let her decorate them.

This was really not why it was a disaster.  I forgot about some of the colors that we would need.  I had trouble finding black at the last minute, but I found a tube of ready-made, dark brown, writing icing at a German store.  I thought the problem was solved, but it turned out to be a very runny icing that was a mess and more gold than dark brown.  We ended up using brown M & M's for many of the eyes.  She had fun, but they looked like some very sick emoji's.  I had a blue, ready-made icing that we were going to use for a tear drop and it just looked like the eyes were bleeding it was so dark.  

She was happy, so all was not lost!

Hannah let her sister design one emoji cupcake.

Christmas markets for Advent opened the day before her birthday (on that Friday after Thanksgiving.)  We went to our first Christmas market of the season in Bern-Kastel Kues on that Friday.  We still had friends in town that had been looking forward to going to Christmas markets, as was Brian.  Brian LOVES Christmas markets.  I cannot even express the love.  Really.  Anyway, Hannah doesn't actually like Christmas markets so much.  Her daddy had to do some sweet talking to get her to agree to go to a Christmas market on Friday, and two more on Saturday.  The reason for two on Saturday was that Drew and Judah's kindergarten had a booth at their village Christmas market on that night.  I was supposed to bring pizza waffle batter.  (That is not a typo!  They gave me the recipe for pizza waffles, and it turned out delicious when they cooked it up in the waffle makers at the market.)   She got extra goodies at the Christmas markets.

We promised Hannah she could pick her restaurant for Sunday night, and we'd finish celebrating then.   She wanted a little bit of America and chose the Chilli's restaurant.  It was a sad excuse for an American restaurant, but she didn't seem to care.  They brought her an ice cream dessert.

The 12 year old privilege this year is two fold.  One is she can legally babysit now.  Woohoo!!!  Brian and I have been waiting for this moment for a long time!  We have enjoyed many date nights out.  We started preparing her and teaching her more how to do this a few months before by going only 5-7 minutes away and once the little three were all in bed until we'd tried all those restaurants out.  Then we went a little further away.  Finally, we worked our way to leaving before bedtime.  She and Genevieve do an excellent job of getting the younger three to bed on time and then the three oldest get to watch movies and stay up until we get home.  They love for us to go out now and will remind us if it's been a couple weeks without a date night that we need to go out again.  Ah, the benefits of heavily restricting screen time just keep coming.

Privilege number two, she can legally ride in the front seat of the car.  She is still shy of the 100lb weight requirement, but that's okay.  We virtually drive a tank anyway.  ;)  This is a privilege that can be revoked if she has an unkind attitude with her siblings or us, something else that comes with the age, like it or not.  This is the privilege that she was most looking forward to.  She loves sitting up and talking with me.  Happy birthday, Hannah!