Last week Emily turned 13. The baby of the family is now a teenager. There's already three teenagers in the house and so for the next year, Emily makes four. Should be fun.
Of course, even though Emily might be the fourth teenager in the house, she's the first teenage girl and that will no doubt produce a lovely new set of challenges for us in the years ahead.
Emily at thirteen is confident, mostly happy and opinionated enough for a small independent nation's government. Her list of interests continues to evolve and expand, but is currently fixated on a whole lot of anime (including an inherited/learnt love of Pokemon). Its lead to a phenomenon that sees her never far from a computer or other means of electronic delivery which in turn has set up just the occasional battle of will with her mother over what's an acceptable amount of time to sit in front of some sort of screen.
When dragged away from the electronics Emily maintains a love of reading and occasionally still dabbles with music, though she's stopped any sort of formal learning. The anime influence has led to some strange music emanating from the bedroom at times, but hey, I'm sure that it could be worse.
Emily likes to complain about exercise, but if the mood strikes she's more than competent in her pursuits. She's currently playing softball in the summer and netball in the winter, with table tennis and volleyball having been recently added to the mix. She surprised me the other week when she came home from sports day complaining about being sore. I asked if she'd managed to have any success through the day and it turns out that she'd come home with something like 3 firsts, a couple of seconds and a third. I had expected her to say that she'd managed to reduce her participation to a minimum of effort. But that's one of the things about Emily. If she's not forced (or doesn't realise she's having fun) she's capable of all sorts of things that even she wouldn't believe.
She's a beautiful, entertaining girl and I look forward the adventures to come. Happy birthday Emily
