Category Archives: Family

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We’re Having A Child

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Calling one of my local American friends today, we did a quick catch up, ” How have you been, fine how about you, ” and then I said, ” John and I are having a child …” and before I could finish my sentence, I think she said something like ” Whaaaat “

Like me, Gillian has a British husband, but they also have two children who happen to be the perfect age to hang out with John’s granddaughter, Jersey Girl. Children are out of school both here and on Jersey for the next few weeks and John flew over to bring JG back to stay with us next week. So what I was trying to say was, “John and are having a child with us next week and I want to invite you and your family to a little pirate themed party on Sunday.” Once she realized I wasn’t trying to join the ranks of older women intent on increasing the size of their family, we settled into the details of the party.

It’s funny how many women there are with children in the six to seven age range in my local circle of friends. I fall into this weird place of being about nine or ten years older than most of them except Gillian who’s still a baby in her late thirties. She’s a natural entertainer making her great person to have at a party and I was pleased she agreed to join us. Tina, who I’ve mentioned before and Lara, a new running buddy, will be coming with their children bringing the child total up to a manageable seven.

I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to have a little one to plan a party for since my own daughter will be twenty-three soon, but I have been planning a fun outing for us down by the river. It’s a perfect place for a pirates picnic compete with a treasure map that I plan to hide in the river (more like a creek in size next to the party area) in a bottle tied up with string.

I love to come up with rhyming clues and have been testing some out as I get ready to create the map. I’m off in a minute to scout out hiding places and then back home to bake and make some party treats.

I’ve already painted an egg carton metallic gold for a small treasure chest and I have a larger one that looks like a crystal jewel box for the larger candy treats. I even made pirate spy glasses and painted a styrofoam sheet metallic gold so it can be a big doubloon for the party.

Fingers crossed it goes off as well as it looks in my head. I’d hate to think there might be a mutiny because between you and me, I am not walking the plank.

February 1, 2009 - Me with Jersey Girl

UPDATE: She’s here, Jersey Girl is in the house!

After bed, bath and reading the book, Angelina’s Birthday, Jersey Girl fell fast asleep. She wants waffles for breakfast having remembered them from her last visit. I think I may have to cut them into a special shape to surprise her. Hmm, now what kind of shape should I do …. suggestions anyone?

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Distractions – Bright & Beautiful

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When bright flowers bloom

Parchment crumbles, my words fade

The pen has dropped …

~ Morpheus

I make deals with myself sometimes … with the life long experience of a master negotiator, I have whole, silent, in my head conversations that frequently begin with something like this, if you do this for the next three hours, then you can …

Today is one of those days.

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Change Of Plans – Suggestions Anyone

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For the last six or eight months, John and I have been planning a big trip in September. Having walked the 105 miles of the Tour du Mont Blanc almost two years ago, I have been looking forward to doing it again with him this fall to celebrate a big birthday I have coming up. To make it even more special, we’ve been planning on taking my sister Margaret with us on the long walk through the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps.

Things got a bit complicated when Margaret and I began to plan her travel arrangements so that the timing might work with the schedule for the TMB. Because she was coming from Alaska, most of the flight options had her traveling for a minimum of 19 hours (it was difficult to find these) or up to 38 hours with the exception of one airline which could get her here within about 10 hours with connecting flights, but only flew from Alaska one day a week.

After all three of us had put in too many hours at the computer with no real progress and loads of frustration, I offered up an alternative plan … one that seemed less like an endurance event (which the TMB really is) and something more restful and less time restrictive.

Instead of walking a path that looks like this … or sleeping in places like this, I suggested a totally different sort of trip to Margaret and she decided it sounded good to her as well.

Even with the change, she will still be here for most of the month of September and for the first time since we were twelve and fourteen, we will be able to celebrate each others birthdays in person. She’s a September birthday too and since John’s birthday falls between ours, we’re going to be eating a lot of cake that month. The big question is, where are we going to be when we are blowing out our birthday candles.

A few days after she gets here, we’ll head for London for a week of exploring. My 50th birthday will happen while we are there, so John will come up the day before and stay overnight in order to celebrate the milestone with me too. Now here’s where you come in, I’m looking for suggestions for things you think we should see and do during our week in London and I’d like to have a plan that includes something special for my birthday.

Having been there a few times, I do have some ideas, but I would love to see if you can surprise me with something I haven’t thought of yet. I’m not sure what is on Margaret’s list, (we just decided on the change recently) but I do know that I would like to photograph London from the top of the London Eye on my birthday.


I would also like for us to see a show or two in the West End, but I am not sure what might be enjoyable. I’ve seen several there in the past. I loved Billy Elliot when I saw it in 2005, and Miranda and I saw my all time favorite musical, Les Miserables when we were there in 2003. I’m not opposed to a more serious production either as I was thrilled to see Ralph Fiennes in Brand on the same trip with her when she was fifteen. If you’ve seen or heard about a production that you think is too fabulous to miss, please let me know so we can consider it for our list.

After our week in London, we’ll be a bit closer to home as we do up the southwest part of England for a week or two. Then we’re off by plane to the next place on our list. It’s one of my favorites and if you’ve reading me for long, you may have already seen some of my photographs from there. Can you guess where we will be by the images below?

A Gift for Abelard & Heloise

This is one I snapped on our honeymoon.

I can’t wait to show Margaret where I was standing when I captured this familiar Paris scene. The seventh picture holds a clue.

Margaret and I will be spending seven days in Paris on our own for a sister’s week. We have a lot already in mind to fill our days, but tell me what you’d want to see and do if you were joining us. I’m looking for things I may not have thought of yet.

Lastly, I could use suggestions from my Paris blog friends on short term holiday lets. I’d like to book a place soon and I have scoured the internet looking for a place that is not too pricey, works well for two, and is in a decent location. We don’t mind walking, (I’ll need it to offset my bread intake) and I have used the Metro before so we are fairly flexible. While I would prefer a studio apartment, if you have a hotel recommendation that is reasonable, I’d be open to having a look at that as well.

I’m so looking forward to spending this time with Margaret. We’ve not had a chance to travel together since we were children and I don’t think our memories of fighting over who had more room in the backseat of the car on road trips in the late sixties and early seventies is going to compare at all with the memories we’ll be making in September 2010.

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When Grief Comes Without Warning

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In May of 2008, I received a message on a Classmates reunion site from an old friend from high school. In it she said,

” Hi Cutie, Nice to see you; desperately happy; hope the same is true for you.”

I was pleased to see her message and happy that in May of 2008, I was desperately happy too. One year later, I was married to my darling husband John and she was suddenly a widow with the love of her life snatched from her without warning. Last year on a Thursday morning in May, when most people were on their way to work or already there, her husband died in a car accident when another driver lost control and came across the medium into the path of her husband’s vehicle. Both drivers died on the scene leaving the people who loved them grieving and forever changed.

Pam and I are friends on Facebook and I have been able to see her journey as she’s returned to teaching and talked openly about the difficulties of making it through her grief. Recently, as the first anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, she sent out a request to her friends asking for a little help in the form of ” beautiful statements” to help her get through the next few days.

May 14 was the day Cullen died. I can’t imagine how it feels to have your best friend and soul mate be there one minute and gone forever in the next, I don’t want to know. I do know what grief feels like from other life experiences, the kind of deep heartache that you think you will never recover from, but I have not been through what she has and as such, I feel at a loss when it comes to an appropriate message of comfort.

The best I can do is to tell her how inspiring I think her love story has been to me. The very idea of still being, “desperately happy ” as she said in her message in May 2008, especially after so many years together, is a lasting legacy to the love they shared and certainly one I would like to emulate.

If any of you have any words of support or comfort that you might offer Pam, please leave them in a comment below and I will make sure she has a chance to read them.

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Airborne

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Miranda went back to Atlanta yesterday flying out on Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day has been a challenge for me in many ways over the years and yesterday was no exception. Waiting in a London hotel near the airport, I woke at 2:15 thinking it was 4:00 and got up to sip coffee and make notes in the dark as I tried not to wake my daughter asleep in the next bed.

Working on an idea for a Mother’s Day post which never made it to the blog, I filled several pages by hand on the largest paper space I could find, writing in the back of a book I had brought to read before bed. After checking her flight information online, I could see there was a problem when Delta had her listed as leaving one day later than she was scheduled to fly.

It turned out that the Atlanta flight had a problem the night before and had never left the US. Arriving at the airport early, she was able to get on a flight leaving six hours later out of Heathrow, and Delta shuttled her with the other passengers over by bus from Gatwick to wait for the flight.

She’s sleeping now in the US as I was when she sent a text message last night letting me know she made it back so we haven’t had a chance to discuss her journey. Because she was added to an existing flight, she had to take any available seat which meant she went from sitting on an aisle to being wedged between two people the whole way back.

After she knew she would be on the flight out of Heathrow, she emailed her dad to let him know the changes since he was picking her up in Atlanta. While she was typing, I noticed a man in desert fatigues coming into the airport with more backpacks and duffel bags than one person should try to manage on their own, even if as a soldier he was used to struggling with the weight of things.

I could see he was trying to pick up the various bags to strap them to his body so I went over quickly and asked to help. I didn’t really wait for an answer and picked up the military issued backpack while offering to take the duffel bag he had already lifted on to the front of his body forming a sort of counter to the large load strapped to his back.

He was almost one color with hair a bit like several shades of sand all mixed together matching the color of his uniform and all of his gear. Looking back now, I am surprised he let me help him as often travelers are warned about people offering help with an intention to harm. I guess my looking like a mom alleviated any concern he might have felt along with his travel fatigue.

As I helped him maneuver two floors up to the Delta check-in area, he told me that he had been traveling for two days from Afghanistan and was just trying to get to Atlanta so he could catch the next flight back to his home in Louisiana.

I found myself telling him how I had been in the army too, noting silently that it was probably years before he had been born from the look of him. After putting his bags down at the end of a long line of stressed looking people, he reached out to shake my hand and said, ” Thank you, ma’am,” just a sweetly as could be. I thought about how his mother was probably waiting for him in Louisiana or maybe he was hoping to surprise her by arriving home in secret on Mother’s Day and how wouldn’t she be pleased to see that even as weary as he looked to be, her boy still remembered his manners.

I asked Miranda to let me know if he made the flight and while I haven’t heard from her yet, I sure hope they found him a seat.

*Photograph by Miranda.

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Getting To Know You

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When John and Miranda met in Virginia at the university she was still attending a little over two years ago, they really only had a few hours to get to know each other and while it was pleasant, they were still virtually strangers when he and I married a year later in February of 2009.

Over the last two years they have interacted a bit during some of my online iChat conversations with Miranda, but most of what they know about each other has been filtered through me as I have talked or written about them.

You never really know how people will get on and it’s a big leapt to think that just because they’re my favorite people to spend time with that they might enjoy each others company as well. I am pleased to say that any concerns I might have had have melted away as I have watched them laughing and chatting about different topics on their own.

We’re off again in a few hours on our whirlwind tour of Cornwall. You would not believe the photographs we are all getting. John is shooting more video than anything else, but Miranda and I have our cameras in hand and it’s been fun at night to reflect on the day and remember some of the conversations that have come from our shared experiences.

Eden waits for us today along with Lanhydrock and maybe we’ll even have a chance to give a couple of babies a squeeze at the end of the day … if we have any energy left.

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These Are The Days

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In the first few minutes of the day when my eyes are barely open and I am still shaking off the last bits of sleep, there’s an increasing sense of expectation as I pull myself back to a waking awareness that I can feel around the edges of my consciousness, a sort of shadowy sense memory that today is a special day and I think to myself, what’s happening today … because it feels like Christmas and birthdays all rolled into one and then I remember that someone very special is sleeping in the next room and I smile as I stretch and think about how excited I am to have another day with her.

Another beautiful blue sky day where we get to explore the world or at least our part of it and I have a chance to see her across the table from me sharing a meal and the kind of table talk you miss when you are separated by distance.

Later we’ll have moments lost in uncontrollable giggling as we look over our pictures of the day and laugh at the funny ways the wind can make our hair look when it catches it and whips it high above our heads where it is captured forever in photograph that neither of us will want to share.

She won’t because she thinks that it’s not her at her best and I won’t because the moment of laughter is so special that I will want hold on to it … keeping it private for just the two of us, a memory of the laughing sweet days we shared in Cornwall she when goes back to America .

I think to myself over morning coffee that these are the days, and how I remember hearing a song with the same title for the first time, in a car, at a traffic light, in 1992, when moments with my then four-year old daughter were everything I wanted to hold on to and remember. These are still the days …


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Grown

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Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.

~Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

If you guessed that our first visitor from America was my daughter Miranda, you would be right. I’m thrilled to bits to have her here and introduce her to my UK life. I just have to remember she’s grown.

When she was a baby, I used to kiss her all over her face telling people who happened to catch me at what some thought was an excessive display of mother love that I was stocking up for the days to come when a mother’s kisses might not be as welcomed, knowing even then that children reach an age fairly quickly and rightly so that begins to give you limited access in some areas of their lives.

At twenty-two she’s been there for while, but I still need to remind myself sometimes. I know it’s healthy and normal and I am glad she has grown up to claim her own space in this world, but sometimes I wish just for a minute … I could have one more chance to shower her with kisses.

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Something Special In The Air

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Remember when I teased you with a hint of things to come at the end of this post ? Well, the day has finally arrived and as American Airlines used to say in the 80’s and 90’s with their slogan,” Something Special in the Air, ” there’s something special making its way to the UK today.

I have been looking forward to this for weeks and daydreaming about it even longer. I’m trying to stay busy until it’s time to leave for the airport, but I am so excited that I have to keep reminding myself to breathe.

If you have any tips on how you stay calm and grounded in moments like these, please share them with me. In the meantime, I’ll just have to cut back on the coffee and maybe go for a quick run on the moor or even to the next village, but not the airport … soon, I tell myself, but not yet.

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Cleaning Out The Attic

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Sometimes when you least expect it, a moment happens that reminds you of another life. A life you thought you had packed away, carefully folded, like clean clothes in an old suitcase. It waits, stuffed into a dusty corner with the forgotten bits of a past you no longer have use for, a neatly packaged collection of memories waiting to be discovered by another generation when cleaning out the attic after your death.

You forget it is even there except for the times when you feel obliged to shift the Christmas boxes or saved baby clothes to make room when the roof needs repairing or the pest control people come by to take care of the scratching sounds you hear late at night when sleep won’t come.

In shifting the suitcase to a new location, you wonder why you put it there and when you open it, you remember and you think, maybe I should get rid of these things that no longer fit me. So you shake them out and hold them up to the light. You might even step outside the attic where the light is better and you can see more clearly.

At the very end of it all, you may share some things with your friends who are happy to reminisce with you and remind you of all you have that fits the you that you have become. You consider what to do with it all after picking through the past, and after ruling out recycling, you stuff it into a large garbage bag and put it out with the Monday morning trash.

When I thought I had no more tears left for the sad mother stories that are at the very core of my history, I found myself wiping them away yesterday after reading your lovely comments. The sweetness and sensitivity you shared was healing and so appreciated. I hesitated for several months before sharing the accidental awareness found in a strangers question last January, but the dream of bowling balls and my mother pushed me to share a part of my life that sadly is similar to others out there. My deepest thanks to each of you for your support and kindness.