Double digits.

For Lily's birthday party I gave her a choice between taking a bunch of friends to the YMCA (great big pool with a bunch of water slides) or booking a room at a hotel for our family and inviting a smaller group of friends to join us for dinner and games in the room and a swim in the hotel pool.  Guess what she chose?
Well, hotels are pretty much a novelty for our family...

As a side note, we did call the hotel ahead of time to arrange for permission to fill their pool with a few extra bodies and they were fine with it.  However, there was another group of girls there for a birthday party (theirs was a sleepover) and they pretty much had the run of the place(or so they thought).  Not a parent in sight for a group of eight fifth-graders.  For real.

I got a call at 9:30 p.m., long after sending our last guest home and just after putting my own children to bed.  It was the front desk.  They said they'd been getting complaints from other guests about girls making a ruckus running up and down the hallways.  No, I informed them, that's the birthday party of girls whose parents booked them a room and then took off for the night(and morning) leaving a bunch of 11-year-olds to fend for themselves.  I was a little miffed that the hotel staff got our group of excitable but well-supervised ten-year-olds confused with the other crowd.  It was altogether weird, really.  And I might have lost a little bit(a lot) of faith in parents these days...

Back to Lily's birthday.  She's ten.  It's encouraging to me that her wish list included beanie boos(stuffed animals), books, art supplies, and chapstick.  Oh, and an iPod shuffle.  Her first electronic.  In a world where eight-year-olds carry iPhones and 11-year-olds have sleepovers at hotels sans parents, I'm feeling pretty content about the innocence of my little girl.  She's grateful, spunky, talkative, imaginative, silly, musical, friendly and smart.  It's fun to watch her grow up.  Slowly.