And now she is...

...seven.
Yep, my sweet youngest daughter was born seven years ago. 12 days over her due date, still tiny, after a labor of 16 hours, she was born at home in Bielefeld.

She was born in November, yet I remember that November she was born was unusually warm, so warm that the trees in the park nearby had begun to sprout small green leaves, which I thought was very romantic. And she was born at seven in the morning, with the first streaks of dawn, after a very long night.

The day she was born, our heating broke. Well, I told you it was unseasonable warm for November, but it was still cold. I remember cuddling her under tons of blankets. I remember my husband brought us dinner and we ate, with candlelight, all four together in bed.  When I first saw her, the first thing I recognized was that she didn´t inherit my body. Far too tiny and slim, just like her dad. And then I saw her face, and that was miniature me, so she was mine.

Ronja was born free and individual, well, aren´t most people? But she stayed like that. Sweet and petite, independent and surprising, and always late. Loosing her shoes not once, but four times in the sand box, so deep we could never retrieve them, and occasionally she just puts them on a river as a boat and they´re gone. But hey, she prefers barefoot anytime. She´s my child to climb out of her window at seven in the morning to play with pebbles, while she´s still wearing her pajamas. She´s my child to bring me snails and mice and worms in her hands, and to try and keep them secretly in her room, and she dreams of being allowed to run around naked all day long.

Or at least live in a forest. In fact, every year I ask her what her greatest wish for her birthday is, to which she replies she wants a forest of her own, including an owl.

You can take her everywhere, and she will be happy. Whether it´s a farm in Poland with people she´s never seen before...
 
or a boat in the red sea in Egypt.

She´ll love it. And she knows no fear. When she was five years old, she flew to London to visit her uncle, only accompanied by her seven year old sister - and she was bouncing with pride and joy. She sees beauty in everything, the pattern of the cobbles on the street, the smallest, driest flowers crawling their way through the cement, the shape of a twig.

She´s the messiest of all my children. She talks in a high pitched voice, so hard it´s sometimes hard to follow her, especially when she´s talking about the drains for thoughts and music she has inside her body. She´s by far my most philosophical child and highly intrested in religion, yet she also loves science the most.

And her fluffy vest, maybe. She can wear that, and her poncho, anytime. She´s awesome at math, she has a mindblowing imagination, she´s a rebel and green in her heart. She´s a sucker for physical contact, she wants to cuddle and be hugged all the time, and she gets that far seldom, being the middle child between an intellectual princess who´s her mother´s first born star, and twin boys sucking up even the smallest rests of my attention and energy.

She´s the one child I argue with the most. Nearly everyday. About such stupid things like taking her schoolbag to school, and not leaving it in the bushes on the way back home. Or not carrying all sorts of leaves into her room, because they will get stuck in the vacuum cleaner. Or tidying up her room. Things that actually, really don´t matter. Especially not to a person like Ronja. To someone who has probably always known much more about l ´art de virvre than I do. And before I get really cheesy, let me just add that Ronja totally rocks, and close with her favourite song:
So, I spent the whole day cleaning and baking and preparing her party for tomorrow, besides working in school. We´ll have fourteen kids over here, and as soon as I´m done with it, I hope I´ll be able to write a huge post with tons of pictures. But right now, I´m just going to sleep.