The Dart: Vidalia toddler ready for second rodeo in life

Published 12:38 am Monday, January 18, 2016

Baya Bequette gets her picture taken during her second birthday party at the Vidalia Recreation Center on Locust Street Saturday. (Ben Hillyer/The Natchez Democrat)

Baya Bequette gets her picture taken during her second birthday party at the Vidalia Recreation Center on Locust Street Saturday. (Ben Hillyer/The Natchez Democrat)

VIDALIA — When you turn 2, a birthday party isn’t as much about what’s happened in your life as what will happen.

If Baya Bequette’s birthday party was any indication, it’ll be a year spent more immersed in the great outdoors than buried in children’s television or computer programming.

When The Dart landed near the Vidalia Recreation Center on Locust Street, it found her mother — Logan Gregory — and grandmother, Debbie Briggs, setting up a pink-themed cowgirl party, the banner declaring, “This ain’t my first rodeo — it’s my second.”

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While Baya has not expressed a particular affinity for bronco bustin’ or the man in the can, the party theme made sense in light of how she’s spent the previous two years of her life, Gregory said.

“Baya doesn’t like the indoors,” she said. “She likes to be outside, to ride four-wheelers, to be in the dirt. She is a very active, outdoorsy child, and so I thought this theme fit.”

Even if there’s nothing else to do, Baya would rather go outside and skip rocks than be indoors, Gregory said.

“She’s not an inside child at all — she likes to dance and be active,” she said. “She doesn’t like to sit still.”

When Baya arrived at the party — she’d been out with her father and her other grandmother — she ran from one game station to the next, expressing joy that others would gather to play games with her.

While the birthday girl had known what a birthday was, she probably hadn’t expected a party to take the form it did, Gregory said.

Briggs said having a grandchild means finding a new kind of love you have never had before, and the birthday party could in some ways serve as a moment when everybody got together to share that love.

“We can always come together for her and join in that hope of a future and a better life than the one we have had,” Briggs said.