Zoe turned nine yesterday. When the hell that happened, I don’t know, but somehow nine years stuttered by when I wasn’t looking.

By the time this happens again she’ll be 18, “legal,” and handcuffed to a railing on the wall of her highly fortified cell inside our impregnable underground compound protected by retinal-scan security measures, sniffer dogs, laser “meatcutter” grids, plasma cannons, and roving biomech hunter/killer teams that home in on the scent of Clearasil.

Boys, you know. They’ll be sniffing about by age 18 and they’re hard to stop. I know, I used to be one.

I wasn’t around for most of what happened during yesterday’s girl-centric birthday festivities — I’m male and was not welcome at the estrogen fest (“Festrogen,” I called it) (and why can’t this anti-boy attitude last???) but Beth summed up all the girlie activities over in her blog.

Grandpa supplied the images below: a retrospective of Zoe’s life, one picture from each year starting when she was about an hour old. Seeing it all collected like that… Wow. And whoa. And… I don’t know, just… That’s my heart there.