My daughter is 7

My daughter is 7.

I would like to say she has been a delight since the day she was born, but it's more like, "she's been a delight since she stopped threatening to die on us and we actually got to take her home".

Still, she's made up for the scares she gave us a million times over.

Our travels in Iran have obviously had a lasting effect on her. I wonder how many other little kiwi girls dress their mathletics avatar like this:



In preparation for her birthday party we badly needed to clean the house and my cleaning mojo kind of went out of control, and we started emptying out cupboards and scrubbing them. And yet again Daughter proved her worth as a tireless worker. Here is my kitchen in its worst moment, when she had emptied all the cupboards onto the bench:

(In case you are wondering why I'm putting this on my blog, it's partly because I've found that these are the photos you find surprisingly interesting in future years, when your house has undergone mysterious and unnoticed changes.)



She did have an ulterior motive for emptying the cupboards - she's wanted to play "let's sleep in the cupboard" for years.



I forgot to take a "Tidy Kitchen" photo so this is a couple of days later when it's started to get messy again:



After Daughter's birthday, we headed down to the local beach to clean up oysters. We spent a short time on Saturday and a long time on Sunday doing this. Again, Daughter worked tirelessly. Every time her grandmother suggested that she must surely be sick of it by now, she reassured us that she was loving every minute of collecting sharp and smelly oysters from the mud in the baking hot sun and she was quite happy to keep going.


She was also so excited to get this Spool Bunny craft kit which she loved making into a new pet. She has named it Sapphire and it goes to bed each night in its own little bed:




We so absolutely love this child to bits.

Seven years of bliss. Apart from the scaring her parents to death at the start part.