My Little Girl is 21

 Hard to believe it's been 21 years.  She isn't my oldest (her older brother turned 23 earlier this month) and she has three younger brothers, but she's my only girl.

She had a fun day I think.  Her littlest brother helped her open her gifts.

 She's really into owls and Grammy provided a good supply of owl goodies - a mug and new journal.

She made a pretty good haul, along with some cash and a gift card.

Her brother especially liked the socks Grammy sent.

 She's been doing lots of goodie making since she's been home.  She doesn't have access to a kitchen at college so she's trying to use mine up.

 These are simple goodies - store-bought gingersnap cookies with whipped cream.  Leave them overnight and they're soft and amazing.  If you get ambitious they can be three or four cookies tall.  But then you have less servings.

 Her birthday dinner is always an appetizer buffet.  We had olives, pickles, cheeses, crackers and meat, a cheeseball and one of her favorites which we call Australian bread.  Years ago I needed to bring a dish to a church dinner that was representative of something people eat in Australia.  I contacted our missionary there and she sent me the recipe. It's just french onion soup mix combined with sour cream and baked in a hollowed out loaf of french bread.

 This is our version of finger food for the allergic-to-everything two year old.  Olives, special potato chips, bacon, craisins, pickles and dried bananas and strawberries.

None of us are real cake eaters so we made her favorite dessert - rice krispie treats.  I shaped it into an owl (her current obsession).  We would have decorated it, but she doesn't like any toppings on her rice krispie treats, so we left it plain.

She is into sock monkeys too, and when she saw these slippers at the Family Dollar she had to have them.

 We also played a lot of pinochle.  I kept getting hands like this - argh.  What to go in?

If you're familiar with pinochle you'll see an amazing meld hand here - double queens around.  Only problem is that she never melded double queens around.  She only saw that she had it when we were looking back through the pictures - ha.

Anyway, we had a pretty fun day and she was really happy with everything and we all had a lot of fun... and decided we ought to have the appetizer buffet more often ;)