Our Baby is EIGHTEEN. 18 years old. Holy Beans. Happy Birthday Abyni

Today is the 18th anniversary of the day I pushed a human out of my body for the very last time. @abyni was born in an inflatable kiddie pool in my bedroom. I think maybe that's why she has always loved the water so much!

Abyni spent the majority of her life as the baby of the family being spoiled by all of her older siblings and never quite realizing that she was younger than the rest of them. Even as a baby, she'd try to get up and run with the big kids and just fall right over because she hadn't learned to walk yet.

She never really crawled, just went from standing to walking and running everywhere.

Then came the great migration when our middle three kids pretty much all moved out at the same time and suddenly she was an "only child" for a couple of years. That seriously changed the dynamics of our family and the whole routine so much more than I ever imagined.

_{Abyni is an incredibly talented musician. She taught herself the ukulele and then the guitar. She sings, writes songs and does a lot of covers on her YouTube channel She took Sound Engineering last year and really excelled at those classes. She's got the talent AND the harder to find stick-to-it-iveness that she must have gotten from her dad, because I certainly don't have that kind of motivation!}

_{She's been really working on her artistic skills the last few years as well and has done a lot of amazing things. She's in her second year of visual media design classes at our local, amazing Technical school.}

_{She spent almost two full years on a sailboat, traveling from Floriday, throught he Bahamas, to Turks and Caicos and the Dominican Republic. She got to experience all sorts of things, from swimming with dolphins, swimming in the ocean daily to weathering hurricane Matthew and sailing during a rogue storm that knocked the mast off of the sailboat when she was traveling with her dad and brother.}

_{She's auditioned for America's Got Talent. She didn't get through, but she didn't let that stop her from pursuing her music (that whole determination thing I mentioned before) and had several paying gigs here locally before school and a 'regular job' took over all of her free time (Yeah, I wish she'd have skipped the job for a while yet, but I'm also proud of her for taking on responsibility and handling it so much better than I did at that age!)}

_{She's the animal whisperer of the house. It's almost strange how the animals gravitate to her whenever she's in my room hanging out. Even the animals who refuse to cuddle with anyone else... especially:}

_{Tiberius will not cuddle willingly with anyone... except for Abyni. He will literally just lay on her for hours until she has to get up and do something else. He fights and wiggles around if anyone else tries to make him do that.}

_{Happy birthday to my amazing, strong, independent, talented, beautiful daughter!}

One of my many favorite covers that she did for steemit open mic (You might be able to hear me singing along in the background. I have a really hard time not doing that, apparently! And my husband being so weird in the bloopers, too.)

I am SO freaking proud of this girl. She is SUCH a strong person, living her life unapologetically with the kind of ambition I always wished I had. I would seriously admire her as a person, even if she wasn't my child. She is really an incredible person.

Other Fiction

Creepy Short Story:

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Creepy Short Story:

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A fun series: Letters from a Boat Cat!


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Animation By @zord189

art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics

_{Photos are mine except where they are credited to their source at the bottom of my post (Or in the case of linked thumbnail cover photos in the sig, they are sourced at the original post).}.