Appropriate birthday gifts for a 15 year old girl

We celebrated P.'s birthday last night. As requested, we didn't sing or have candles, thus we didn't need to scrounge the candles and figure out how to make them work with ice cream. Everyone was able to come except A., who needed to work on a paper. The little girls were thrilled to have B. back for a bit. 

Here are some scenes from the evening.

This is us not singing to the birthday girl.

B. and K.

M. and D. (You can see that M. is particularly enthused by her younger brother.)

L., in front and G.

(I'm still working out how to do the zoom-thing on the iPod... but you'd be disappointed if I didn't show you truly awful photography, right?) Happy girl with a check from her grandparents.

This is her with one of her gifts. A gift, I might add, that she really didn't expect to receive. Think for a moment... if you were a 15 year old girl, what would you ask for? A phone? No, we do that at 16, so she didn't ask. Clothes? No, but she did ask for more riding breeches. Shoes? No, but she wouldn't have turned down a pair of tall riding boots. Give up?

Throwing knives.

Yep.

This is why she didn't think she was getting them... because every time she would say, "I want some throwing knives," her mother would say, "What?! What are throwing knives and why would someone want them?" Ha Ha, fooled her, didn't I? Because what is she holding in this picture? Yes, throwing knives. Am I the cool mom, or what?

She also received another exciting, cool mom gift. Want to know what it was? Look in the picture, can you see her holding that nice big bag of....

kitty litter?! I mean, come on, what 15 year old girl doesn't want a big bag of kitty litter? Well, it turns out this one does because it also means that her parents are finally giving in and letting her get a very long desired cat. She has been doing tons of research on shelters and available cats and how to introduce cats to bouncy Labradors. Yep, I'm the cool mom.

The little people were only vaguely aware that there was gift opening going on because B. was here and this is what was happening over in their corner. P. opened presents to the sounds of B. driving race cars with his little sisters.

M. and P. 

I don't know when said cat will actually arrive, but I expect it will be rather soon. You can probably expect a whole slew of blog posts about it, because what was the internet created for if not to show cat pictures.