Happy Easter! April 24, 2011

I dropped the ball a little bit this year. I didn’t put out my Easter decorations, much to my mothers dismay (who is joining us for the festivities), Clara’s white shoes arrived the day before (phew!), her dress was ironed in the last 12 seconds before leaving for church, and I forgot all about the Easter egg hunt that the bunny always holds at our house on Easter morning. (I did get the baskets ready, but Matt had to make a late-nite run for egg stuffer’s and do a rush bunny job. Apparently, half of our friends are as slack as we are though–he said it was the social event of the year, in the Kroger seasonal aisle.) I had my usual Sunday morning head-spin because my children do make it their mission to send me over the edge whenever we are in a hurry to get somewhere. Oh, and we forgot to bring our flowers from the yard to put in the Easter cross at church. But we made it. To early church no less.

Yesterday we dyed eggs…another miracle. Thanks to Nana who remembered to bring the kit and Matt who remembered to buy eggs. I just organized the event itself! And boiled the eggs within an inch of their lives (yes, we had a few cracks).

Pictures almost didn’t happen because I left the cf card at the office but I raced out and got it in the nick of time.

These are not Martha Stewart eggs, that’s for sure…but we had fun.

We like to torture our children by making them wait until AFTER church to see their baskets.

This is so they will be still in the pew and not wiggle the whole time. Or because we don’t get up early enough to get dressed AND have fun.

Clara’s Aunt Elizabeth gives her a pearl for each birthday and
Christmas to add to this necklace. Hopefully Clara will wear it on a wedding day.

Mr. Donkey joined our family yesterday. (Nana is a sucker for her Clara-girl)

That’s my gold bracelet from when I was little…(you know I’m all about the old stuff). Speaking of old, these iris’s were transplanted from my great grandmothers house in Columbus, Georgia, to my moms house there, then to her house in Charleston, and now mine in Knoxville, TN.

My freckle-faced boy

My mother and me. We think Henry looks most like her.

The whole fan-damily. And THREE out of four are looking at the camera and smiling.
A record for the Gage household.

My stinky chilluns…

and our stinky old dawg…wheeler. aka whee-whees.

Happy Easter to all!

Isaiah 60:1 (Whole Chapter)
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.

Linwood Cemetery April 20, 2011

I grew up going there–to the old confederate cemetery in Columbus, Georgia where I grew up. It was the very first cemetery there, and it came to be just one year after the city was founded. My grandfather, Henry Ritch Callaway was buried there (among other ancestors). I never knew him, but on Sunday’s after church (not all of course) during my childhood, we went there to pay our respects (my beloved grandmother, his wife, was still living, and a huge part of my life). Often it seemed the visit was more to pull weeds or replace gravel…but it also became a time when my brother and I explored. We wandered the old cemetery and read the grave stones. Amazed by the dates on the stones, by the discovery of little ones who’d been laid to rest, the surnames of families we knew, the beautiful headstones and monuments, the mausoleums that provided endless fascination, the canons and rows upon rows of confederate dead…and the quiet serenity of this place, I came to love it here. Sometimes, admittedly, I dreaded the stifling heat in summertime, wearing my sticky patten leather shoes and itchy slip…sometimes I didn’t want to go at all. But this place always had a piece of my heart.

When I was a senior in high school, the unthinkable happened. One of my close friends from childhood was killed in an auto accident. Her families plot wasn’t in the newer cemetery in town, but in the one I knew so well. So there I stood, with my grandmother, in the rain, under an umbrella and watched as my sweet friend Ashley was lowered into the ground.

That summer, my friend Kathy and I hatched a plan to drive over to Auburn so I could show her the school I’d be attending in Fall, Auburn University. Trouble is, I doubted my mother would okay the plan, especially since I needed her car to get there, so I told a little fib. Okay. More of a whopper really. We said we were spending the day at the mall, and off we went. It wasn’t a crazy trip…it was literally a quick drive over, an even quicker tour, and the return trip home. But as we passed the old cemetery, we decided we needed to go in and visit our old friend. Trouble was, we couldn’t find the plot and as the sun began to set we were still searching. Finally we found her, and there we sat and reminisced. We talked to her, we laughed, we cried. And then we went to leave.

Just one problem. There was a sign we failed to read on the way in. And apparently the caretaker didn’t realize we’d come in at all. It read “Cemetery will close at sundown”. And close it had. Huge iron gates had been closed and locked, and the fences surrounding the place were topped with coils of barbed wire. And there we were…..in my mothers car. Her brand spankin’ new burgundy Buick Skylark.

There was only one thing to do….scale the fence like the criminals we were. Of course I was wearing my favorite red Pappagallo flats, which admittedly, I may, at that moment, have been more worried about than my mothers wrath…but I risked their supple leather surface and went for it. (It must have been quite a sight…two prissy little girls scrambling over the  barbed wire fence of a cemetery after dark). Somehow we did it, but now what? We were in a sketchy old part of town and it was dark. Cell phones hadn’t been invented (’cause remember, I’m old?!). There was a paint store across the street…I can still see the sign in my memory–a big rainbow. Ahhh. It was called Rainbow Paints! And there happened to be a single car parked in back of the lot. We walked over and knocked on a door.

After waiting a few minutes with no answer we turned to leave…and suddenly the door opened. And when I tell you that nothing could have prepared us for what was next, just trust me. The man that opened the door, was standing there before us…in nothing but a towel. Now I’m pretty sure that Kathy and I were plum crazy because instead of running, like we surely should have…we asked if we could come in and use his phone. Well thank God for miracles…the naked man was very kind and kept his distance while we called Kathy’s dad.

Yes, Kathy and I had quite the history of getting into trouble together and we had mastered the art of calling the most appropriate parent to the rescue when we got into scrapes that we couldn’t finagle our way out of. Kathy’s parents had already weathered three older children who rivaled Kathy in their, well, sometimes, less than angelic ways…so they were perhaps a little more worn down than my mom, and had become the usual go-to rescue crew. Of course in this case, my mom was also called…because hello. Her car was locked in Linwood Cemetary.

The rest is a bit of a blur. I recall quaking in the back of Mr. Driver’s Chevy Blazer as the police were summoned. The caretaker, it seemed, lived an hour outside of town and he couldn’t be reached. The police said they would surveil the property overnight but my mother was having none of it. None. Of. It. And she was TICKED. I’m not sure if she rode there with the Driver’s, or how she got there but I sure do remember her voice that night.

The end of the story is that somehow the car made it of of there with all of it’s wheels intact. I’m sure I was on restriction for some time after that (at this point, it was a way of life), and Kathy and I were forced to say “good one Ashley. You got us!” She DID see us scrambling over that fence and she’s probably still chuckling about it.

For years after that, when I traveled home from school, and later, other cities I’d landed in, I always made a visit. I wrote letters to Ashley and left them at her grave (anonymously, but at least her mother and father would know she was still loved and remembered). I pulled the occasional weed, and shuffled gravel at my Grandfathers grave.

And yes, my dear grandmother now rests there beside H.R. –her graveside service was a beautiful celebration of her life. Ashley’s mother was there too, and she saw in me, what her daughter might have been.

I basked in the quiet of the place. And I always made sure to leave well before sundown.

Note: Because everything I write is from my memory alone, it is a little dangerous for me to venture into anything remotely historical (let’s face it people, I wasn’t always paying attention in class) so to ensure the accuracy of my portrayal of Linwood, feel free to check out their link. You will surely see what I mean about the beauty here.

http://www.linwoodcemetery.org

It’s Not You, It’s Me April 12, 2011

The year was 1989? South Carolina…won’t say which city, lest I give away the subject of this post. But I moved there post college to work for an ad agency. My salary was a whopping 15k and life was good (thanks to mom who was graciously filling in the financial gaps). Working downtown at a hip agency, living in a wonderful “apartment” in a home in the historic district. I was early twenties…the world by the tail… and then I met HIM. Tall, dark and cuter than pie. He boldly came up to me at a party, asked me if I wanted to go out (I’d met him once before) and breezed right back out (as in left the premisis). I was beyond intrigued. I was out of my element in this city. It wasn’t a college town..it was a town filled with thirty-somethings and newly marrieds. Not at all where I was in life. I still fancied myself as slightly alternative, although my mother made sure my closet was stocked with Pappagallo-wear, adjacent to my favored  tie-dye, “hippy” fare.

I could play in either circle, and his circle was the preppy one. He was a good deal older than me…29, and ran with a crowd of couples…either attached, married or engaged. He was the life of the party. I seriously don’t think I ever felt so special as I did during that time (except of course when I met Matt Ha.) . Chivalry was so not dead. He fawned over me…in front of his friends…I was the sweet young thang…he still “had” it.  His friends seemed to think I was the coolest, the prettiest…and this was intoxicating. I was straight out of college so I surely didn’t know how to grill squash with parmesan cheese. Hell, I didn’t even know about bagels and cream cheese. He enlightened me. He had an interior decorator. His house was decked to the hilt. It reminded me of my parents house….so again, this man was leagues beyond the college boys I’d just left behind on Auburn’s campus. We went on amazing canoeing trips with 30 or so of his closest friends…we traveled to his parents home and to mine. And he was super sophisticated, he was a real “grown-up”. I thought I should conform. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t stuffy. He was seriously FUN. When I say, life of the party–it ain’t no joke. Trouble was, he was so much the life of the party, that I’d pretty much see him when he picked me up–and see him once more when he took me home. And that’s where the trouble began.

I started to notice that he was quite intoxicated when he took me home (not unusual, as I just stated I was right out of college). What was strange was the kiss goodnight. He’d squint his eyes so tightly shut  I thought he’d squish his eyeballs straight out of his head. I think he held his breath too. He clearly wasn’t into kissing me. And HELLLLLO? This is ME we’re talking about. Ha. TOTALLY Kidding. But I surely sensed a problem. He was also very unaffectionate in other ways. As in, no hand holding, in perfectly good hand-holding situations. This made me feel insecure to say the least, so I finally broached the subject. Never have I met with such defensiveness. I felt terrible. Poor thing. I’d hurt his feelings. (Nevermind mine.)

Around this time he turned 30. You’d have thought he’d been given the prognosis of certain death within days. He had a huge party in which he got completely obliterated. And then he fell off the face of the earth. Literally. Shades drawn. Dark depression. Shut. Me. Out.

So you can guess what happened next. I was well aware of the major distance between us, but hoped I could ride out whatever it was that was causing it. I offered to help him with his dog. (He’d gotten a rambunctious golden retriever who was destroying his perfect house because it was cooped up all day while HE was at work. I was wanting to increase my fitness regime (and be his knight-tress in shining armor) so I offered to come and get the dog each afternoon and take it for a walk. After about a week of this, HE came outside to “talk”. “This just isn’t going to work Kathryn”, he said. “It really isn’t you,” he said. “It’s totally me.” “I’m just going through some stuff.” I puffed up in all my bravery, hugged him good-bye, as if to say…I am totally here for you even though you have just now crushed my heart into zillions of tiny pieces. “Chin up I said. You’re a trooper!” and I went home to die.

Yep. I thought I would.  I was a smitten kitten like no other, and I was destroyed. I understood for the very first time what it meant to have a broken heart. It physically ached. And I literally never laid eyes on him again…

Years passed. I moved away, moved on. But always I wondered…why. What went wrong? I’d ask people about “HIM”. I still had connections in the Carolina’s–but no one ever knew a thing. Had he married? Was he okay? Did he get past his 30th birthday? Never an answer.

Well then…what? 20-something years later? This funny thing called Facebook came to be. And I had an “Ah-HA!”  moment. I have never typed a name so quickly in all my life. And there he was. I sucked  in my breath. There HE was. His beautiful smile. Part of a happy couple. An owner of a beautiful bed and breakfast in an idyllic place. And I let out a huge sigh of relief. It wasn’t me at all. It was he all along. And oh, I was so very happy for him. And his partner. So clearly in love. Such a sweet person, so deserving, of the happiness he’d found. With someone other than me. Someone I could never be. And I was totally okay with that.

Because of course, he was gay. And while it stinks a little that I was the last girl he probably ever dated…and maybe it was me that made him say “enough is enough..I need to be who I really am now”, I know that in life there is a perfect plan. I was part of his, and he of mine. We are part of each others fabrics…

and for this I am grateful. Here’s to you my friend, should you read this, you know who you are. . And I wish you the very best life has to offer

Tanorexic April 11, 2011

It’s that time again. The time when we bare our crepe-y winter skin again, and in my case, pray we don’t blind anyone in the process. As I’ve said before, I was a teen in the 80′s and in the 80′s, the tan RULED. The darker the better. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of  those olive-skinned girls who soaked up the sun and turned brown as a berry. I was fair, with auburn colored hair, blue-green eyes and freckles. But I was also quite determined and I gave it everything I had, on my mission to be the bronzed beauty I dreamed of being.

For me it started in junior high school…when I actually hung an arm out the window during class in hopes of tanning it. Where I was jealous of the girl who came back from Spring Break with horrible blisters on her face from the sun wishing it could be me instead. Any kind of sun was good sun. I even resorted to QT, the first of the self-tanners. A miracle in a bottle. You wiped it on and waited a few hours…to turn the most glorious shade of…orange. But color was color. Trouble was, I didn’t quite get the art of application and the girls at cheer leading tryouts were a little skeptical of my sudden tan. They didn’t hold back in saying so. And pointing out the streaks down the backs of my legs.

I had a willing tanning partner, in my BFF Kathy, along with her sisters Nancy and Susan. They had a trampoline in the back yard and we set up the sprinkler underneath it so we could stay cool while cooking our flesh on it’s asphalt colored top. We mixed concoctions of iodine and baby oil, because some urban myth said that this mixture would turn us from freckle-faced girls into savage natives. We even lay on a bed of aluminum foil to enhance the baking process. Each weekend was spent in the pursuit of a tan, but in more cases than not, produced a shade more lobster-like than golden brown. On Mondays I proudly revealed a swollen red face at school…in my mind, I looked fantastic. People who looked on in horror were just jealous.

It got so bad that I took to running home at lunchtime to sun, and then again the minute school was out. My mom begged and pleaded for me to stop, preaching the dangers of sun exposure…even framing a newspaper article on the subject and hanging it next to my bathroom mirror. It also became her punishment of choice. If I missed my curfew I’d be banished from the sun. This was a fate far worse than death. Once I opened the second story window and crawled out onto the roof (which had a steep pitch). Just then the phone started ringing and I knew that if it was for me, she’d be heading upstairs. In my scramble to get back inside I almost fell off the roof so I was scared straight. For that one sunny day anyway.
Banana Boat made an oil that we could only find in Florida so if someone was headed there we gave them our money so they could buy us the little bottle of liquid gold. It was like wiping on a sunburn…but I had to have it. It was my drug of choice and I had my dealer bring it to me.

It continued in college. A whole slew of us would lie on the roof of our dorm between classes. And then we discovered tanning beds. They weren’t the air conditioned, ventilated machines of today. Rather they were torture chambers…where your body poured out every ounce of hydration as you struggled to survive the brutal heat.

In the years after college it continued to a degree…but I also started to notice the crinkles around my eyes. Still I was addicted. If the sun was shining I felt the call. The perfect day off was spent at the pool…and the beach was serious business. While my friends were moving past the obsessive need for sun and actually played in the water or walked…I was still working towards that elusive brown that I never quite achieved. Sunscreen was still a very. bad. word.

Finally, after hearing enough news reports, and noticing that women who spent a lot of time in the sun weren’t looking all that great in their later years I started to re-think my tanning habits. It sunk in that tanning beds were an absolute no-no (I hadn’t used them since college except for a few visits in the Springtime to get a little color before I bared all in public) and I broke down and visited a dermatologist to face the ugly truth. And ugly it was.  Under the glare of the purple lights, meant to reveal all of the damage I had inflicted upon myself, I saw what my mother had warned me about. Horrible damage. Damage that would only get worse over time, and reveal itself to the world. Damage so severe that it threatened cancer. Yes, I have had multiple pre-cancers removed and have to wear sunscreen on my face all the time. I have had brutal peels and treatments to heal some of the damage and in the sun, I wear a hat, and gobs of sunscreen.

Admittedly, my extreme caution has been mostly limited to my face and chest…the sunscreen I use on the rest of me isn’t the spackle I use on my face. I do allow the sun to come through to get at least some color. I’ve also visited a tanning bed early in the season in recent years, under the pretense that I’m “protecting myself from a bad burn at the beach”. Of course I cover my face and chest so that makes it a little safer, right? But I’m noticing now that the sun doesn’t discriminate. Legs and arms, backs and shoulders, show the damaging effects of the sun too and in fact, most skin cancers are found on LEGS. So I’m trying, really trying to embrace the idea of the spray tan…or maybe the look of the skin that God gave me. I envy the pale girls who proudly bare their unblemished skin…wrinkle-free and soft as a babies bottom. I envy their confidence, their good judgment, their comfort in their own skin.

I will always love the feel of the sun on my face…the warmth of it on my body. Learning to be responsible about the sun has not been easy for me and it has taken me longer than most…but I think it has finally sunken in. Like the liquid gold used to. Now I rub expensive creams into my skin, in hopes of turning back the hands of time, of erasing the damage I worked so hard for. I am forced to face the harsh truth, that mom really does know best. And there is hope for us all. I have attended a rehab of sorts and am mostly cured.
I am tanorexic no more. And it’s going to be okay.

Moca Ratroll April 10, 2011

 

That’s what Henry called it for years. We hated to tell him the right way to say it because it was so dang cute.
We’re talking about that device that rules every household.
C’mon, don’t lie. You or someone in your family has fought over it, spent countless hours of frustration trying to locate it.
You’ve shaken it, rattled it, talked to it…the remote control that is. It’s a love/hate relationship for sure.

Our remote control sits on a coffee table about 4 feet from the tv. Yep, as in, four STEPS to actually walk to the tv to change the channel.
But I’ve seen more energy expended than you can imagine, of pillow shuffling, couch moving, arguing etc. just trying to get the thing to do what four easy steps could do.

So ours was in rough shape, and not working correctly. But rather than buy a new one (or heaven forbid, GET OFF THE COUCH)
my husband would literally take it apart, remove the batteries, perform surgery on the thing to get it to work once, maybe twice.  If you held it “just so”… and then do it all over again.
This operation could literally take up to 5 minutes; minutes during which the channel wasn’t getting changed, and what 6 seconds or so could accomplish if
someone would consider MOVING.

We finally got a new one this weekend…the war had been waging for more than a year I know, so it was time. It’s shiny and new. Easy to operate. And quite cooperative. For now.

Hallelujah people! We’re back in control now! (Or are we?)

 

Phone Tips For People Like Me Who Hate Phones April 8, 2011

First I must say, I totally cut and pasted this article and I DID NOT write it. I hope I am not infringing on any copyright laws ): But AMEN Matt Haughey, whoever you are…this article hit home

Like many of us, blogger, MetaFilter creator, and friend of Lifehacker Matt Haughey isn’t a big fan of the phone call or of voicemail. Here he offers three effective but not particularly rude tips for limiting expectations when your phone starts ringing.

In no particular order:

1. A friend recently got a new phone & number on Verizon, and neglected to set up his electronic voicemail account for the first few weeks. When you call, after 4-5 rings it goes to voicemail but the message is simply “This user has not set up their voicemail yet. Goodbye.”

Now, this won’t work for everyone, but if you spend a minimal amount of time being interrupted by phone calls and you have a stable job and relationships and don’t need to get every single call that comes in, this no-voicemail thing is kind of awesome because it is one less inbox for this friend’s life. I know when I get that message I’ll either text, call back later, or just send an email. I’m envious and may not set up voicemail for future new phones I get.

2. In the spirit of Last Year’s Model, my home landline is connected to a 11 year-old cordless phone we have no reason to replace. It works for the hour or so total talk time we use it each week, but since the phone sits in the cradle charging constantly, the batteries tend to go bad after a few years. The batteries are currently dying so the phone has to stay on the charger all the time, and when you do get a call, you get about 10 minutes of talk time before the batteries are dead and the call drops.

Instead of replacing the rechargable battery pack, I’ve been enjoying this feature for a few months now. I know it’s kind of asshole-ish, but it’s really nice to be able to keep things short and sweet with everyone that calls my house. It’s really handy and I don’t spend hours on the phone chit-chatting because the phone simply can’t do it, and I have no guilt about cutting a call short. I can always have a long conversation on my cell phone if need be.

3. There are several web services out there to answer the question “Who owns that unlisted number that just hit my mobile phone?” but my favorite is WhoCalled.Us. It’s an awesome free service where people report details of who called them and what they wanted when they called, think of it as crowd-sourced telemarketer reporting. It’s handy because you can safely ignore most calls to your phone after looking up the numbers at this site.

If a weird unknown number comes into my iPhone, I ignore it and look up the number later. 9 times out of 10, it was a sales call from a bank, a timeshare company, or a bullshit work-at-home offer. I wish it was integrated in my phone, so I could just hit a button to do auto lookups from the missed calls page on my phone, or if an incoming call had known records at whocalled.us, it could display the top three rated comments on my screen before I hit accept or reject.

Matt Haughey is a blogger, builder of web sites, and bicycle lover. Follow him at one of those many places, or follow @mathowie on Twitter.

Queen for a Day… April 5, 2011

Whoever decided that birthdays were a day of entitlement, clearly hadn’t met Clara Gage yet. Because this Queen Bee takes it to new levels. I can do this because “it’s MY birthday, I can do that because it’s MY birthday!” I’m thinking perhaps the day should be more about humility and graciousness. Afterall, you were fortunate enough to wake up to another day, another year, on God’s green earth. People are showering you with good wishes, gifts…cake even! Getting a year older doesn’t mean you get to be…well, a tad bit unpleasant…for a day.

Not that my Princess Prunella is totally at fault…because you see, part of the problem could be this…

The other day the kids were choosing a movie at Blockbuster, and Henry made the BIG mistake of bargaining for his choice. “Hey Clara, if I get to pick the movie, I’ll be your slave all day on your birthday!”. Clara is smarter than me in this respect. She knows a good deal when she hears it and is wlling to wait for it. I on the other hand, was always about instant gratification…I never would have waited days for my end of the deal to be met.

So, I needn’t explain how this morning at my house went down. You can imagine. Let’s just say, there were tears and admonishments, and phew! I’m glad everyone is out the door and on their way.

Note to self. INTERVENE when certain deals are being negotiated.

and finally, FINALLY, we have ushered our girl into her seventh year…Happy Birthday Clara. All hail the queen!

Celebrating My Blue-Eyed Girl! April 4, 2011

Clara’s birthday is tomorrow but as always, she has figured out how to make the celebration last for days.
As you know, her party was this weekend but she’s already trying to figure out how she can work another big celebration tomorrow, on the “real” day.
Hey, I’m game. Who doesn’t love a party? So I declare…this is Celebrate Clara week

Getting her into the world was no walk in the park. With our son Henry, we were able to conceive easily, but suffered two miscarriages before he was born,  (all 9 1/2 pounds of him). The day we had the ultrasound that would determine his gender, I wrote the two names we had chosen, Henry for a boy, and Sarah for a girl on a piece of paper and placed it into an envelope. We asked the nurse to circle the appropriate name and seal the envelope. Later, over breakfast at our favorite spot, we opened the envelope. Of course, the name “Henry” was circled. Now, anyone who knows me knows how badly I wished for a little girl, so I admit, I shed a tear or two, and then got crazy excited about my little boy. Of course we would have another chance for a girl, and how lovely for her to have a big brother to look after her. Henry was a perfect baby, a beautiful blessing.

A couple of years later we decided to go for the girl. I bought the book “how to choose the sex of your baby” and made it my job to ensure we were having a girl.
But oh my. Suddenly we couldn’t get pregnant at all.  Two years of fertility treatments and three  miscarriages later, I was losing hope.
And thinking, I needed to be happy with whatever God chose to give us, if anything at all.

But could my life be complete without a daughter?

And then finally, a pregnancy that seemed to be on track. We went in for that first ultrasound and guess what? We were having another boy.

My girl was not to be. We decided to name him Holt. I embraced it. Two boys, Henry and Holt. This was God’s plan for our family.

Then tests revealed that this baby was at risk for downs syndrome. I was beyond terrified.
I decided to have amnio to know for sure…to prepare.

Lying on that table, feeling the way I felt, well, I will never forget it. Then the nurse said, “so you already know the sex of your baby?” I said “yes, it’s a boy”…

and you know what she said? “no! you are having a GIRL”. I almost flew off the table (not a good thing to do when you have a foot long needle in  your belly).
I started crying hysterically. She looked at Matt and said “is she happy or sad?!”

Happy can’t describe. And you can think what you want about what I am about to say–I’m just being honest. I thought, “I may be having a baby with down syndrome, but it will be a GIRL with down syndrome. I can handle it.”

And then, two weeks later we got the news that this precious baby girl was perfectly healthy. How could I be so richly blessed?

I had always planned to name a daughter Sarah Callaway, after my grandmother, but at some point during my pregnancy I
discovered that both Matt and I had Clara’s in our families. Clara Callaway instantly felt right. I knew my grandmother would understand
(she never went by Sarah, we went by her middle name, Lucille).

And so on April 5, 2004 Clara Callaway Gage made her debut.

She makes me giddy. I love her more than any girl in the whole wide world–I can’t imagine that anyone can ever love her more than me.
She completed our little family…we have all we want and so much more. Two perfect children (perfect is relative of course

Happy Birthday sweet girl.

7th Heaven… April 3, 2011

My sweet baby girl is having a birthday this week. How did she go from…

one?

to two.

then three.

and four.

suddenly five.

and six.

and yes, now nearly seven.  (Tuesday).

We had a small party on Saturday. Seven little girly’s in honor or Clara’s Big Seven.

I kept the invites simple…for once

Check these PRECIOUS bunny cake pops from Lulees Lollies

http://www.luleeslollies.com

These girls are TOO talented. I sent them the invite, told them the colors I wanted and voila! They created these precious pops and shipped them all the way from Ohio.

And not a one was broken. DELICIOUS TOO! Yum.

I made a bunny tee for each little girl…

As  we have every year since the first, we broke out the birthday duck in honor of Clara’s birthday month!

Miss Thang got a brand new bike…she wanted it to be COOL, not cute…no pink for her…

To celebrate we took the girlys to the movie, HOP. (That’s why we did the cake pops…super easy to transport!)

Clara and Katherine

The Super Seven

The car ride home was like a roller coaster…everyone HOPPED up up SUGAR!

We had one friend spend the night, and as you can see, at dinner we are still pretty wound up

No late night for these two…they passed out on the couch early. But I think a good time was had by all!

And I’m sure the celebration will continue through Tuesday…

and then the years. and years to come.

One of those weeks… April 1, 2011

Ugh. We all have them right? Where day after day in a given time frame, something…no, SOMETHING goes wrong, or totally aggravates, frustrates, INFURIATES…and the next day, just like Groundhogs Day, it’s something else.

It started on Saturday. In an effort to get ahead (ha. that was my first mistake), I went to the office (to free myself up this week to do many, many things that keep getting shuffled to the side…like the painting I have to RE-DO because the first one got damaged when shipping, or the website updates I’ve been meaning to make for months now…maybe I was even going to wrap up that new tee line project I’ve been laboring over for weeks on end, among other things) but instead I got a whole big fat can of NOTHING ACCOMPLISHED because of technical issues. I ended up running all over town spending a bunch of money I didn’t need to spend, updating computer programs (which I barely know how to do) and then struggling to make them work (again, because I barely know how). By days end, I was nowhere closer.

I did give that particular issue a rest on Sunday (to work on that painting RE-DO!) and was back to it bright and early on Monday. Now, mind you,  I left out the part about said project (with technical issues) being for our very important customer Garnet Hill (and mind you again, ALL of our customers are VERY IMPORTANT) but we are under deadline on this particular one, and deadlines, as you know, make everything MORE FUN. And so Monday went much like Saturday. A grueling day and NOTHING accomplished. Except for a bad case of mounting frustration and stress.

At around three o’clock on Tuesday (yep, what are we up to?  Nearly 24 solid hours of hellaciousness?) that ONE problem was resolved. Hallelujah. (Too exhausted at this point to exclaim in all caps), so I moved onto the next thing, thinking, ahhh yeah baby, we’re fixin’ to crank NOWWWWW. But you guessed it…a new technical issue replaced the old one. I stayed at the office until 10 pm and then managed to do something crazy with the alarm on my way out and…ugh. You get it.

Wednesday actually went pretty well, as I recall…seems like I may have gotten some work done (although it’s all a little foggy). I worked out in the a.m., determined to de-stress–it was grand. I did recall at the last minute that Henry had a doctors appointment all the way across town, so there was a mad scramble there, but hey, we managed. Was the streak OVER?

But then came Thursday.

Not a complete loss, except that we decided to tackle our taxes today. I mean, why not go ahead and finish off an already bad week? Bad enough except that on the way there, I had a tense work-related conversation with someone I love to pieces and managed to say the exact wrong thing and ruined THEIR already horrible week, which in turn, cranked up MY streak again…because Lord knows, I didn’t want to say the exact wrong thing to ANYone, much less someone I love. And then, as I expected, my lovely tax man said some of the EXACT wrong things to ME (like, Kathryn, you are very disorganized) and “you owe blah, blah and blah…” which topped me off.

So Friday is here. I am afraid to say too much as I might jinx the day. But I have a family issue to deal with for much of the day and my sweet Amy-girl was kind enough to attend an important  1/2-day meeting on my behalf. BLESS YOU AMY! (I suspect you will read this while sitting in aforementioned meeting so as to stay awake If the family issue goes well (which I believe it will), the last of the Garnet Hill project resolves itself (it is due MONDAY in California)…which I PRAY it will…then we can call it a week. It’s 7:55 a.m. and I’m still in my pjs. This is glorious. I have coffee. Glorious. Kids are at school. Glorious. House is quiet.  Glorious.

And since I am listening to the news as I write this, I can summarize all of this by saying…it could all be a HELL of a lot worse. My crummy little week would be the sweetest picnic to millions upon millions of folks having TRULY awful weeks–the sort I can’t even fathom, praise the Lord. Not to get all sapped out…I mean, we’re all entitled to the occasional pity party…but my problems are so very minute compared to the problems of many, so if it’s okay by you, I’m gonna keep mine and be happy about it.

I’m also gonna go out tonight with friends, have a big time and make this week nothing more than a fading memory. Glorious.