Happy birthday, Anastasia!

Dear Anastasia,

This is you last Christmas. Now you don’t like Elsa and Anna anymore, but you sure looked cute while it lasted.

I love you. My littlest baby is SIX YEARS OLD! How did that happen?

Right now, we’re reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. You want the parts with the most lines.

So many things have happened this year. First of all, your Daddy is impressed with your reading. “I can’t get over how well she reads in English and in French. Some of the words are hard, and she doesn’t hesitate, or she sounds them out.” This summer, we walked into Giant Tiger, and you pointed at the wall and said, “This is French: bienvenue. This is English: welcome.”

Last night, at Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, you asked questions throughout the movie (!!!!!!), but you started reading the names in the credits at the end.

It makes sense to me because you’ve always been very independent. You want to read books (Captain Underpants, for example), so you ask, “Can we read?” And sometimes we say yes or no. But if you can read on your own—wow! The whole world opens up. You don’t have to wait anymore.

You take swimming and gymnastics. You claimed to like skating, but it was mostly glum plodding on the rink. Now you’re the smallest person in Level 3 swimming. It made you happy to graduate from whale into a number level, like Max.

There’s a lightness about you in gymnastics. You’re bouncing and leaping and seem to have having fun, even though you complain about having to go.

You don’t like having tubes in your ears. Your speech is normal now, so I thought we were over the hump, until you started yelling, “What? I can’t HEAR you” at Max. The audiologist found a 25 percent hearing reduction on your right side and mentioned that because your brain is developing, you can lose the ability to process sound. It made you cry that you’re going to get them redone, but I say, thank goodness for Dr. Ali Shahnavaz.

For your birthday…wow!

You initially wanted an ice cream cake, like Max, but ended choosing “the good cupcakes. Rhonda’s vanilla cupcakes” which became a gigantic heart cake.

Then you picked the piñata. “I want a doggy. No, Mommy. No, a cupcake!”
“A cupcake would be the easiest,” I said, and you blew up a balloon. It was the first time you blew up your own balloon for your piñata. Actually, this is your first piñata. You also helped build it.
Then you changed your mind about the shape. “I want Donald Trump.”
“What?”
“No, me!”
“I don’t think you want us to smash you. Do you really want—”
“DONALD TRUMP!”
“Okay.” How many nearly-six-year-olds pick Donald Trump for their piñatas? But you do.