Happy 18th Birthday, Alexa!

My sweet sister,

Well, the tears have already started, and I haven’t even written anything yet. This birthday comes as bittersweet to me because it means your an adult. Your 18th birthday! This is monumental, yo. You can legally buy lottery tickets (which you totally need to do today). You can legally sign your own doctor forms. You can legally drive anytime. You could before too, but now you can legally drive a car that you buy on your own. So hurry up and get that diploma so you can buy CHP a Lamborghini. Seriously. You can legally watch an R rated film. You can legally vote – what?! And get a tattoo – not that you should unless you want, and then I’ll go with you to make sure you don’t choose something horrible. You can oh ya know, check yourself out of school…. 😉 – You can get on jury duty, but don’t hold your breath. I’ve been waiting since I turned 18 to yell, “GUILTY!”. No such luck. You can go clubbing? Don’t. And sue people… and go sky diving… okay I’m stopping now. You can do so much basically! But you can also go away to college, and that’s the part I’m sad about. I have absolutely loved our days together over the past 18 years. The day you entered the world, I remember making you a welcome home sign with the Dunlap babysitter. But now you’re a big girl (think of me saying that in a I’m-talking-to-a-puppy-or-baby voice)! And that means saying goodbye to you in August. It’s hard. I’m not okay with it because I don’t want to miss these moments with you, but I can’t be selfish 🙂 And I *guess* I can sport some tarheel blue mess instead of NC State, especially if it means you’re following your dream and passion. I kinda can’t argue with that since I did it. I’m going to really miss our usual coffee dates though, our times with our pups, I won’t be able to use you as my muse anymore, I’m going to miss pretending to be Irish so we can hang out with The Script longer than everyone else that waited in the rain longer than we did, I’m going to miss randomly calling you with a creepy “Whatcha doin??” aka let’s hang out time, I’m going to miss you hijacking my phone and taking ten billion selfies, I’m going to miss having the only person that knows what snow cream is around, and taking over all of Apple with our own selfies, and just having everyone ask us, “Are you twins?”. I’m going to miss YOU. But most of all, I’m going to miss the photobombs. Happy 18th birthday, little lady 🙂

SO they say a photo is worth a thousand words. Get ready. Since I can’t share these beautiful moments in your yearbook, I’ll just share them on my blog. LOVE YOU.