It must be almost spring, because I just had another birthday! I didn't see it coming ... never noticed a box that came in the mail from my "secret admirer" addressed to me. Then I got a one-of-a-kind birthday card in the mail and an e-card from Miss Hetty and The Bulletin staff ... with "tweety" birds singing Happy Birthday! I should have known something was up before that.

Next, a bouquet of flowers appeared -- Alstroemeria, sometimes called Peruvian Lilies or Lilies of the Incas, in a lovely orange shade chosen to complement me! And cake -- white cake with vanilla icing and whipped cream and strawberries and ... oh, oh! ... candles! Four candles! It gets worse every year! I refused to go near the flaming things.

I learned my lesson the first year when a candle singed my eyebrows. Now I watch from a safe distance and NO amount of coaxing is going to change my mind! Just put some whipped cream in my dish, I said. I'll clean it up lickety split. And I did. It was delicious!

Well, you can see from the pictures that I had a great birthday, even if I refused to be in the same picture with those candles. I stayed in my comfy rocking chair until Miss Jerrianne put batteries in the robot "mouse" and turned it loose on the floor. Oh, boy, was that fun to watch! It skittered and scooted and buzzed all over the place -- and got stuck in corners and under furniture and heat registers.

When the "mouse" got stuck, Miss Jerrianne grabbed it by the tail and sent it scurrying off in a new direction. That "mouse" is the best little vacuum cleaner you ever saw and it cleaned up the corners of the room like nobody's business. Even Miss Jerrianne was impressed. Well, she did threaten to take its batteries out and fill the space with catnip if it didn't learn how to stay out of corners...

Now I get to be four years old for a whole year, and then we'll get to celebrate my birthday again. Next time, I hope we can have the party on the floor instead of the table. Double the whipped cream and skip the candles, I say. And then I might even agree to be in the same picture with the flowers and cards and cake. Long enough to sample the whipped cream, anyway.

Photo © Jerrianne Lowther
I'll watch from here!