Big birthday today! So we started the morning off with some boat work. Because no day, birthdays included, is complete without a couple hours of bloody knuckles in the engine.

But soon enough the engine work was put on the back burner and the celebration kicked off. We blew up fifty balloons and threw them around the house. The girl loves her balloons. Then Mama went to work on the cake. There is a first for everything, and as we stood there with Ouest helping stir the batter, we prayed the cake would actually work out.

It did, and before long Ouest was at the table hovering over it with a grin a mile wide. She was excited, she didn’t know why exactly, being two means nothing to her, but she sensed something special was going on for her benefit and she was happy about it.

She couldn’t figure out the blowing thing, so Mama blew out the candles, and then she tucked in to her once yearly sugar intake. It’s funny, you’d expect a girl so deprived of sweet sugary things to eat would devour them at the first opportunity, but Ouest just has a few bites and then quietly sets it aside to play with the candles instead.

In the afternoon we headed to shore and swam in the nearby river. The girl cracks us up, she is just so unlike any little princess we’ve ever known, the way she’ll charge headlong into a cold, murky, flowing river. She just goes for it in whatever she does, without hesitation.

We eased Lowe into the water and after a few unhappy seconds he adjusted and loved cooling off too. Ouest threw rocks into the river and swam from one side to the other, with some assistance, half a dozen times, and then we dried off and wandered into the empty nearby palapa restaurant for some fish.

On the way home we swung by to say hi to some friends that had pulled in while we were ashore. Some other people we’d met the day before swung by too, and as we sat in our dinghy, the whole group spontaneously burst into Happy Birthday for Ouest. She sat there at the front of the dinghy looking up, happy, but unsure still why everyone was giving her small gifts and singing to her. The look of confused glee was enough for me. It was the perfect day for a little girl who requires nothing from life but our love and attention. I wish it could always be this easy.