You Say It's Your Birthday? Well It's My Birthday, Too, Yeah....


Today Rhiannon is six. Yesterday she was five. But now she is officially a "big-girl". She is in first grade. She has asked to use real plates that do not have cartoon characters on them and real silverware (instead of the plastic ones with cartoon characters on them) and real glasses (instead of the plastic ones that have cartoon characters on them). For a sad moment, I think she has outgrown cartoons. I wonder what I am going to watch on Saturday mornings. But then she turns on Spongebob and I relax a little.

I made the yellow card (pictured above) for her and hid it in her iCarly over-the-shoulder bookbag. She wears one of her two Beatles tops and her trademark double-pony. The top margin lists all of her favorite things right now including Kitties, The Beatles, and her latest crush, Zac Efron:


Yes, she is six. But she has been into hotties since she was one and slobbered ONLY over a picture of Tom Brady on the cover of ESPN: The Magazine. He still hangs on her wall. Rhiannon got her ears pierced last weekend, did not cry or flinch, and takes great pleasure in telling anyone who will listen that the pink stones set in silver are "October". Her green peridot will have to wait until October to replace the pink ones now in holding the piercings open.

I have never taken a look at whom Rhiannon shares her birthday with, and of the hundred or so famous people I could find on various Internet lists, I was able to cherry-pick some truly notable figures, sorting them into a truly polarized list. There really is no in between here. So one list is for "suck" and the other is for "rad". Each list is ordered from small to big, least sucky to most sucky, least rad to OG (that's "Original Gangsta" to those of you scoring at home).

Sucky (least to greatest)

Fred Durst, lead hooligan in Limp Bizkit
Slobodan Milocevic, 1st Premier of Serbia, monster
Al Roker, annoying TV weather "personality"


Rad (least bogus to teh awsum)

Benjamin Harrison, 23rd US President
Robert Plant, lead singer for Led Zeppelin
Isaac Hayes, Chef in South Park (among other things)
H.P. Lovecraft


And...Demi Lovatto (the KEWLEST, according to Rhiannon). Demi is 17 today and gave Rhiannon her first "rock" concert experience.

Tonight we went to Chuck E. Cheese for Rhiannon's on-the-day birthday dinner. We met her friends Kwynn and Riley, ordered pizzas and all-you-can-drink soda (it is no longer "pop" in Arizona as it was in Wisconsin). We also split 150 game tokens which were fed into child-sized one-armed bandits at a rate I haven't seen since the slots were loosened on the Casino Queen outside of St. Louis.

I have been to worse Chuck E. Cheese's. My worst experience was my first one back in the early 1980s, too old to stare in wonder, gobsmacked at animatronic, bepizzad rodentry, to young to sneak out for a smoke, and too poor in quarters to blow the wad on an infinite game of Moon Patrol. The whole place was bowling alley chic, and every one of the children chained to the arcade machines looked wan and haggard like the kids I've seen pictured in the textile mills of 19th century England.

Tonight, things were less hellish, strangely subdued. The children didn't notice. Rhiannon played "squash-the-spider" a lot, a game where the child must physically stomp on illuminated spiders which then make a splatting sound not conducive to post-game pizza munching. Half of the gaming hall was lit as if we were actually playing games outside, while the other have was shrouded in darkness, the hulking animatronic shapes giving me flashbacks to when Kiss were exploring the haunted amusement park in their first ever TV special. The staff were conspicuously absent excepting the thin, troubled girl at the velvet rope waiting for other children to arrive. I'm not kidding. There is a gate to get into Chuck E. Cheese. I half-expected other costumed mascots to arrive, push through the line, and get invited in, even if their names were not on the list.

The children played, gathering meager amounts of tickets from scoring tens of points in skee-ball, stomping on three out of forty spiders, tossing tokens into the machine at exactly the wrong time to get two tickets instead of 100. Between the three girls after 90 minutes of play, they split the booty like good pirates and lay seige to the prize counter.

Anyone who has ever been to one of these places knows that small children, given a certain amount of tickets to spend, will spend hours poring over the plastic prizes under glass as if they were in Tiffany's choosing diamond solitaire jewelry to wear to the Oscar's. The help behind the counter know this, and it's amazing how patient they can be as the kids negotiate:

"I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS SPIDER RING IS 10 TICKETS! I THINK IT IS FROM THE 5-TICKET BASKET!"

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME? 100 TICKETS FOR FAKE PUKE? I CAN GET THE REAL THING FOR FREE!"

We are haggling for loose goods in New Amsterdam. We are bartering for camels in Cairo. This six-year-old blondies are like a gaggle of giagias in the vegetable market in Argos, bickering until the man behind the table raises his hands and lets them take just so he won't get hurt. Or cursed. These girls know what they're doing. If I ever get a book or movie contract, or buy a house, I want these three girls on my team with Rhiannon as the closer. The bank will be paying ME to take the house of its hands.

Rhiannon gets a silver, plastic ring with pink stone and secret compartment which she will no doubt later use to stash unrefined sugar for consumption at school, a blue, beaded bracelet, and a packet of Pop-Rocks, that lovely, explosive candy from which sprang the urban myth that if you ate a packet of Pop-Rocks and drank a can of Coke that your stomach would explode and kill your 12-year-old ass. I remember once watching a friend take a dare to do it and none of us stopped him from making the attempt. The coolness of his imminent explosive departure to the post-Texas hereafter far outweighed any concerns of ours that we were about to lose a friend. Sometimes life is like that.

Pop-Rocks crackled merrily like an L.A. county wildfire in Rhiannon's mouth as we drove home. She and Kwynn had gotten into a fight where Kwynn lightly butted Rhiannon's head, forcing her out of the picture snapped in the automated picture booth. Rhiannon was shocked and cried. Kwynn would not apologize. They stood apart, each waiting for the other to do something, to blink, a Cuban Missile Crisis in the making. Eventually the tension eased. Their friendship is a strong one and, once armed with cheap loot and sated with pizza, they had the hazy look of tired forgiveness, post-8:00 on a school night. As the song says, "she was too tired to fight about it".

Rhiannon and I sat for a photo-booth portrait, too, the results of which scared the living daylights out of Rhiannon. The photo's border reads, "My Trip to Chuck E. Cheese's", and in the picture I have become a zombie about to gain my daughter's knowledge by eating her brains:


Anytime Rhiannon is naughty, I'll threaten to show her this picture. Which will likely be never as she really is a good kid. And although six might be too old for cuteness, she'll always be cute to me. And I look forward to watching cute become beautiful over the next few years.

This is the last entry in the Cute Report of Rhiannon Reinhard. I'll likely start a new blog in a little while, but for now, it's time to go back and read this blog from the beginning and remember, tracing her cuteness back to its Wisconsin headwaters.

Thanks to the readers who followed along as Rhiannon grew from baby to toddler to little person, and as I grew, too, filling out the shape of a man by the grace of my daughter. How can someone so tiny have so much love? And every day there is more of it.

Rhiannon. Finally Cute.

Andrew (Papa)