baby girl

Happy 24th Birthday to my gorgeous, talented, loving, conscientious, kind, beautiful, wonderful daughter, Marissa!

I’m hoping you won’t mind all these pictures I’m going to post here. From this top one taken during the last months of your senior year at the University of Arizona… to this one when you were the only ballerina in black tights – when you were just over four years old.

Then there is this next picture, taken on your fourth birthday. You were obviously NOT happy that there was snow on the saguaros on December 1st in Arizona! Some things don’t change – you’re still always saying it’s too cold.

Look how pretty you and your girls are for your 2006 High School Senior Prom – (Marissa’s the second one from the right – just in case some of you readers can’t tell one beauty from the other!)

I can not begin to tell you how much I LOVE this picture of you in your Belle – Beauty and the Beast dress that our neighbor, Kathy, made especially for you…. along with the, always present, naked Barbie next to you on the couch.  Oh, how I despised dressing Barbies!  At the time, I thought those days would never end, and here they are, so long gone!  But now… I can honestly say… I don’t miss even one minute of dressing Barbies!!!  Some moms just aren’t cut out for that stuff… but I do miss playing Barbies with you!

And now you live in beautiful and exciting San Francisco. A city you first visited when you were only 8 months old and then again along with your brother and us back in… I can’t remember what year this was, but there you two are, posing in front of the bridge. Funny – you look cold, as usual.

I will end this “Happy Birthday” pictorial with one of my more recent favorites – one of the many photos with you and your senior-year college roommates, taken for your Christmas cards that year. There were prettier ones, but somehow, this one is my favorite – too cute of each and every one of you beautiful university girls! (hopefully, sweet Paige will miss this post – even though I love her face in it!)

And by telling you … in the immortal words of one Miss Kelly Clarkson – “My Life Would Suck Without You“!!!

xoxo xoxoxo  I love you, Marissa Lynn Hopkins!