When we left for this year, I was nervous about what it would be like to take the girls away from school, friends and the things they love. After all, at 13/ 14 you are moving away from your family, spreading your own wings, not pinned to them for a year. Was she going to hate the year? Totally resent us for this? What would it really be like to spend this year away?
And here we are, halfway through and she is 14, and not one of us regrets taking the plunge. Isabelle has amazed us this year. Her easy go lucky approach to challenges, her mellow attitude, her willingness for adventure. She is kind and patient beyond reason, she is both mature and at the same time holds on to the kid inside. For every challenge we have thrown at her she has flown above the challenge. She is the equilibrium that keeps this family sane and at the same time the funny joker that throws us all off.
We have talked between us a bunch about how different it is to travel for a year rather than a year of trips over a longer time. The biggest thing is long enough to really walk away from everything, but as we celebrate this birthday, it reminded me it is also long enough to each celebrates a birthday, and to stop and reflect on how much we each have gained.
Morning breakfast selfie wishing this amazing kiddo a happy 14! Where did the time go?!?
Cinnamon roles have been a traditional birthday breakfast for the girls. Lily did an amazing job helping find the ingredients, making them with few baking supplies and bake them in the toaster oven.
Enjoying the fruits of her labor
Traverse found all of these fun birthday treats. This one was great, you light the top which melts wax and as the flame gets lower the whole lotus burst open, lighting the additional candles. The heat then spins the whole flower while a small battery inside, now connected to the circuit plays happy birthday. Not only did it provide a fun musical birthday, but was a fun science experiment as we took the thing apart trying to figure out how it works and to make it stop playing the music, and spinning.
While the morning was our family, the evening was a fun New Years bash filled with 2 birthdays, more food than we could eat and wonderful friends. It turns out that Krista, a wonderful woman from the US who has been living in Bhutan on and off for the last 10 years with her sweet family, also has a birthday on the same day as Isabelle. In her eternal generosity, they offered to have a birthday party / new years party at their house for all of us and other friends.
Here is the cake again after the we lit the amazing sparkler candles.
Lots of light - candles for Isabelle and Krista.
Doing her best to blow out the trick candles.
This. We could do a whole blog about just this cake. The Erbele girls are amazing cooks / bakers and dear friends to our girls. They made this amazing cake for Isabelle’s birthday. Double layered chocolate (the bottom brownie, the top chocolate cake) with starwberry filling covered in this amazing frosting. They put 14 trees around the outside for her birthday and made our two dogs on the top. They even made Luna in the snow and Nalu in the sun. For me, so much was summarized in this cake about this year. We left so much to go, but what we found is that we truly loved is still with us and our new friends, adventures and perspective only added light and love to those things we treasure the most.