Isabel's Birthday

Our Bel is a funny girl, all right
Used to be bald and it was quite a sight
Now she's grown up and has hair with some curl
And usually people know she's a girl

Bel has imagination to spare
She'll play clapping games with no one else there
And she'll talk, talk, and talk, into thin air
Her "friend" Masha's gone, though we know not where

Bel makes new friends in a moment or two
A waitress, a businessman, any will do
She smiles and jumps in their laps and that's that
Makes friends out the car window - two seconds flat

Belly loves eating her sugar and salt
(Unless she attends to a parental "Halt!")
She takes it straight up, right off the table
Is she destined for rehab? Perhaps she's unstable

She's determined, whatever it is that she's doing
Stubbornly opting for anguished boo-hooing
But often just doing what she wants to do
She'll yank out a tooth just to prove it to you

Among this African traveling crew
Bel's is the very last birthday to do
And what a To-Do we have in the offing
We're likely to finish it sneezing and coughing

First she wakes up to her Birthday Surprise
A breakfast for royals, a feast for the eyes
Prepared and attended by Molly and Maddie
Whose secret activities made Bel quite batty

Then to the Sheraton to fetch her a cake
(Our oven's in Celcius - we're too scared to bake)
Then wait for the man whose first name is Frew
(Like me, it must sound like a Seuss name to you)

This man who's named Frew will set up a Jump
He'll bring it around in his car and he'll dump
It right in our compound and start the inflating
While the kids gather round, laughing and gyrating

Bel will be first in the Jump, you know why
Because she's the Birthday Girl, first in the sky
She'll jump and she'll jump and her friends will join in
And that's when the party will really begin

There'll be eating and drinking and party hats, too
But mostly the jumping is what we will do

Then after the pizza and cake and goodbyes
We'll sit with our Bel and remember with sighs
How the first night we met her in Brooklyn she came
out in the shower, a babe in the rain

Six years have gone by so fast and so furious
And many a time has been quite uproarious
We're happy this girl has been ours to know well
We're happy to say Happy Birthday to Bel!