Happy Birthday Missy Woo.

Today, my little girl turns 4. I can't believe it; half of me feels like it's flown, the other half feels like she's been around forever.

In order to celebrate her birthday on my blog, I thought I'd share with you four photos depicting her life so far, one from each year.

In this picture, she's 8 days old. As you can see, she was a big baby. 59cm long, and 9lbs 3oz. After her birth, the delivery suite went mental and I ended up on two drips with a whole team of midwives trying to stop the bleeding that ensued. I actually lost 2 litres - 4 pints - of blood, but it was a minor miracle that I didn't need a blood transfusion. However, I was made to stay lying down for 14 hours afterwards which made for a long day, and Missy almost got forgotten in the melee. Luckily, like here, she slept. And for the first 3 weeks of her life, she rarely wore more than just a nappy, as it was that hot.

Moving on, this is the second picture I have chosen and it's still one of my favourites of her. It was taken on Christmas Day 2007 and she's holding onto her Iggle Piggle that I had the forethought to buy in October before it sold out everywhere and became the toy to have that year. She's 18 months old here and you can already see the mischief in her eyes. By this time, she was already using lots of words but could she walk? No! She was nearly 2 by the time she started walking. I didn't panic because I know I was a late walker too and her brother wasn't especially early but man, what a pain! Carrying a large baby around was blooming hard.

And so to the photo of her third year. This is another Christmas time photo, taken by my Mum (which is amazing as she normally cuts heads off). By this time, Missy Woo really could talk the hind legs off a donkey; in fact, speech was the one thing she seemed to work on when she could have been walking. She was still not particularly confident physically by this stage but apart from that, she was great. And she liked to pose, as you can tell.

And so to the last picture. It's one I took yesterday, at her party. If you don't follow me on Twitter, you won't know that she fell off a slide in someone's garden on Father's Day and has a fractured humerus so the pink thing on her arm is actually a cast.

I can't believe how grown up she looks now, especially compared to the last picture. The uniform I'm buying her for school is in 5-6 and although some of it is not that big on her, the rest is big, but not massively so; just a bit of growing room. She's bigger than some of the children in Monkey's class; when I took him into school for his settling in sessions last year, the teacher thought she'd gained a new pupil! I think, in part, it's because she acts older than her age and her speech is so advanced. She still makes me hoot with random sayings - she asked me if she could listen to music on my "peapod" and later, she suddenly asked me if Baby Jesus only had one hand!

So, there she is. Missy Woo is 4 today. Happy Birthday, darling - I hope you have the best birthday and we love you loads.

My little girl is all growed up, but she'll always be my baby.

Edit - I've come back to this post to find Blogger has listed its publication date as Sat 3rd July. Which is interesting as Missy Woo's birthday is the 5th! I cannot have written this post on the 3rd because I didn't even have the last picture until Sunday 4th. Go figure.