Excruciating Details from Mia's 7th Birthday

Mia turned 7 on Sunday. Her original plans involved going on a cruise to Disneyland with her entire 1st grade class and any one else she's ever known. Eventually that morphed into me taking Mia and 2 of her friends to brunch at the fancy restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. I think that was a good compromise, no? Though if you've taken even one almost 7 year old to a fancy restaraunt lately you probably would have told me to do the cruise. Not that they were bad, but when you take kids to anywhere fancier than Red Robin, you suddenly realize just why it is that you go to Red Robin, and it's not for the food. I think the best part was when Mia opened one of her presents and used her outside voice to exclaim, "It's just what I wanted-- a whoopee cushion! When you sit on it, it sounds like a fart!!" I would just like to say to the (childless) couple sitting right next to us: thank you for not snarfing your fresh-squeezed organic orange juice. I was not so restrained.

Do you know how many times I've heard the word fart in the last 72 hours? As well as the sound to go along with it? And then there was my dad who was gently encouraging Mia to take the thing to church. What really cracks me up though is that Mia doesn't use it for jokes on other people. No, it's for her. To sit on. Over and over again. Oh, and by the way, it's self-inflating. This means she can entertain herself for hours. All she has to do is sit on the cushion, perform a slight bum lift, and repeat the process for as long as she wants. Yesterday this went on the entire time she was doing her homework. She now sees no reason why she shouldn't enjoy a fart sound every time she sits down. In fact, she was quite upset when she came home from school today to find I had moved the whoopee cushion off of her chair. "Don't you know that this belongs permanently on my chair?!" she scolded. And then she promptly sat on it for punctuation.

She has a nick name for it. I believe it's Fartsy.

Oh, and within the first 24 hours, it popped after a particularly enthusiastic pounce. Thank goodness for duct tape, eh Fartsy?

To all her Bardsley uncles: you have a niece you can be proud of.