Except her title is “Miss 5 AND A HALF”

Yesterday was a big day at our house because Caroline turned five. AND A HALF.

This is a milestone she’s been waiting on since the day she turned five last August and I am so happy that she is now officially five AND A HALF because I no longer have to listen to her angst about just being “plain five”. And really who can blame her for all the excitement? I know I cannot wait until I turn 37 AND A HALF later this month.

Since she is like me and cursed with the summer birthday, she gets to celebrate her half-birthday during the school year. They didn’t offer this half-birthday class party feature back in 1977. I endured a lifetime of pool parties with whichever three friends happened to not be out of town on vacation. It’s a wonder I’m not in therapy.

Fortunately, my child has a brighter future filled with faux birthday celebrations. She’ll never have to suffer through the endless parade of fall and spring class birthday parties knowing she’ll never get her moment in the sun. It’s like always being the runner-up in the Miss America pageant, but with icing instead of a crown.

Her teacher sent home the February calendar with February 3 marked as Caroline’s birthday celebration. I told Caroline that we could go to HEB to pick out birthday cupcakes for the class even though I am still harboring some bitterness towards the HEB bakery after the whole “cake-donut” fiasco. So on Saturday we went to HEB and picked out chocolate cupcakes with hot pink icing and Tinkerbell rings on top.

Bless her heart, she wanted to get blue Spiderman cupcakes for the boys but I had to draw the line at custom cupcakes for a group of Kindergartners who have been known to lick glue off their fingers. We compromised and bought Spiderman napkins for the boys and Tinkerbell napkins for the girls.

And is it just me or is Tinkerbell looking a little racier than she used to? I think Disney is slowly transforming her into a Bratz doll with wings. You can’t fool me, Disney. I’m on to you.

At some point she got a little carried away with the HALF-birthday thing. Everything became an argument of “but it’s my HALF-birthday tomorrow!” In fact, Monday night at dinner I told her she needed to quit playing around and finish her dinner and she said, “You shouldn’t be so hard on a kid whose five AND A HALF birthday is tomorrow”.

It took everything in me to not say, “THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL THING!” And then maybe adding “And while we’re at it, neither is the Easter Bunny.”

But that would be mean.

After all, who wants to get that kind of news on the eve of their five AND A HALF birthday?

She requested that Mimi and I come and eat lunch with her at school prior to the birthday celebration and, by the way, could I please bring McDonalds? So we walked into the school right before lunchtime bearing a Happy Meal and two dozen of the brightest cupcakes you have ever seen. (I’m not kidding. I can’t get the icing stains off my fingers even eight hours later.)

We sat on the stage in the cafeteria and she ate a few bites of cheeseburger in between waving to all her friends and getting up to throw away every small piece of trash she could find. Each time she got up, she walked slowly across the front of the stage, wearing her 5 AND A HALF birthday crown, while waving to the crowd.

So that’s how they roll in Kindergarten these days. She got to be Miss America complete with icing AND a crown.

I was born three decades too soon.