Colemania.com

Cora turned five today. We celebrated by having a Princess Party sleepover last night with a few friends from preschool. The party went well and none of the little princesses lost her nerve or needed a carriage ride home before bed (and three of them managed to see midnight without turning into pumpkins).

All the girls had fun but the real winner was Callie. She was thrilled to be hanging with the big girls and the big girls seemed to vie for her attention. It’s not so bad to be three and running with the cool crowd.

We promised Cora we could go out to eat for her birthday dinner and she picked Friendly’s. (No surprise: the two best restaurants on Earth in her opinion are Ledo’s and Friendly’s.) Once, while the server was at our table, Tina mentioned something about the “birthday girl.” Well when the server arrived with dessert he also brought with him about half a dozen reinforcements to sing the Friendly’s version of the Happy Birthday song to Cora. Their version included the lines, “If you’re good you’ll get your wishes, but if you’re bad you’ll wash our dishes.”

Being naturally very shy, Cora buried her face in Tina’s shoulder while the crew sang. Once they had left and she had a little time to recover she started repeating the part about “if you’re bad you’ll wash our dishes” and laughing like it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

While tucking her into bed tonight she told me that she wants to call Gram tomorrow and sing her the Friendly’s birthday song. I guess it was a good birthday.

A tech. installed our fiber optic phone and data connection today. Why do I choose to update my web page and talk to my grandmother via laser beam? Because it’s so cool that I can!!!

This weekend Callie decided that she wanted earrings. Her big sister has been talking about getting earrings for weeks. There’s even a particular earring kiosk that we keep returning to because she wants to pick out earrings, but her courage always turns to water when it comes time to pierce her ears.
This weekend, though, on our way to the mall to repeat this cycle once again, Callie decided that *she* wanted earrings this time. And when we reached the point where Cora’s couraged ebbed Callie’s did not. She picked out her earrings, sat up in the chair, got earring number one, then earring number two. My brave, decisive — and now sparkly! — little girl.

We just had a baby! Cameron was born in September and is doing great.

We had a poll running here asking what our friends thought of the names we were considering, and allowing them to suggest some names of their own. Cameron was a reader-suggested name and had the most votes from everyone else. That was not our only consideration in choosing the name but it was helpful. Thank you.

As we mentioned during the poll, Jason frowns on popular names. For our purposes, popular is defined as any name that has ranked in the top 50 in the Social Security Administration’s Baby Name Data in the past 10 years. The name “Cameron” is a little too popular by this method, reaching 31^st place in the year 2000. It’s a great name though so Jason learned to lighten up.