An Eleventh Birthday

Olivia will be eleven on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

This Sunday, her best bud, her favorite cousin, that imp Jaxon, will be ten. His dad got a coupon from Jungle George’s in Fort Wayne offering a free birthday party.

We considered doing a joint birthday for Jax and Liv on Sunday, the day my brother was able to schedule the free party.

At first Olivia was cool with that. But the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to have her ‘party’ on her actual birthday.

Last night, she and I talked about what she considered a party. She wants Barbie decorations and plates. She wants a pink cake with pink frosting and maybe a giant pink B on the cake denoting that it is a Barbie cake.

Okay.

She went on to tell me that she wants to look like Barbie too. She wants her makeup to make her look like Barbie and she wants to wear Barbie pink clothes.

Okay, but…

She wants her Barbie styling head to be the centerpiece of the table on the night of her birthday.

Okay, fine to all that but does she understand that this ‘party’ will be her, me, her dad, her sister, and her Gram and Pawp?

She nodded.

Whew.

I continued the conversation with, “You know, maybe next year when you turn twelve, if you’re talking to your classmates, maybe we can have a party where we invite some of them.”

She sort of rolled her eyes at me, as if to say, “Whatever Mom. We all know I have no intention of speaking to my classmates, like, EVER.”

Except I kind of think she WANTS to speak to her classmates. She wants to interact. She wants to be part of the fun, the groups, she antics that right now, she just observes. She just hasn’t figure out how to break the ice. I mean, we’re six years in at her school and she’s talked to maybe two classmates. So she’s got this precedence that she’s set and maybe she feels like talking to them has become this HUGE thing that she doesn’t even want to overcome.

Who knows? She still received speech therapy at school, which emphasizes communicating with her peers. That’s her biggest challenge these days.

So maybe having a goal, a friend birthday party when she turned twelve, will help her work toward talking to her peers.

It can’t hurt.