I didn't forget you, Stephanie!

Happy Birthday, you little princess!

She was the first girl to latch onto me when I arrived in January. I had already been good friends with Jessica and Merline Jean, but because they were in school longer each day, it was Stephanie who had first dibs on me. She would appear in my room at all hours of the day (I'm still not sure if she was skipping class!) and just sit on my bed with me. We couldn't really talk because her French isn't very good and my Creole wasn't good either, so we laughed a lot. I remember specifically taking turns drawing pictures and then grading each other's drawings. She would give me a 10/10, so then I would go higher and give her a 25/25, so she had to go higher and give me a 100/100, and so on. Of course, neither of us is really any good at drawing so it was probably a good thing when we moved on to playing cards and teaching me Creole. She was the first person who told me that you have to throw a "nan", "la", or "an" after each noun or possesive pronoun. I still haven't totally mastered that skill.

Time went on and I got to know Steph better. She stopped being "cute" and became one single word: "BLAZE!" She is one of the silliest little girls ever, and she absolutely loves it when grown ups like me and her adoptive mom are blaze too. She is a mischief-maker, very happy to hide in the hallway with a baggie of water in her hand so that she can squirt me when I walk by, or to lie on the floor behind my bed so that after I finally get everyone out of my room at night, she is still there. I always caught her, but she usually got an extra kiss and a good thump on the butt out of it. Dancing and singing are passions of Stephanie's - she will sing High School Musical songs at the top of her lungs; never mind the fact that she doesn't know any of the words. She is very close with her family: her 3 biological siblings with whom she fights but is very protective, and her biological mom who comes to visit regularly.