Happy Birthday!

On October 10th we celebrated my wonderful wife's 29th birthday, the first of many I am sure. On the night before, I worked on preparing a great meal for a mother who too often eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pasta with no sauce for lunch on a daily basis.


Normally, I would not brag about my cooking, but this meal turned out amazing! I did a little research and ended up grilling fresh lamb and asparagus. I also tossed a fresh salad to go along.


The lamb had a nice rub with lemon and spices, and the asparagus was drizzled with a balsamic vinaigrette glaze and fresh Parmesan cheese.


All of this was topped off with a nice Merlot!

What a wonderful and amazing woman, mother and wife, who deserves this kind of meal everyday, and too often ends up with much less!

Small Successes: Felines

1. I successfully washed our bed sheets, bed skirt, pillow shams, throw pillows, duvet and comforter and returned all bed belongings to their proper places in the same day.*

2. Also that day, I emptied two closets of 85% of their possessions, cleaned, sorted, donated, trashed and organized them, before tucking them neatly out of sight, again, in the same day.*

3. The night preceding this day, I successful preserved the life of my former feline friend who chose the ease of a bathroom break somewhere in our bedroom rather than a trip outdoors; a choice made in obvious ignorance of the results of using such a potent smell to awaken my husband, whose 3:00 am solutions to a cat's misplaced urinal, although undoubtedly effective in prevention, are not always the most reasonable.

* The successes of this day are a result of the joint efforts of a highly motivated mother and father, a frozen casserole dinner, the first sunny day in weeks, a particularly engaging back yard mud puddle and a significant amount of grace.

What do you do with four kids, four swim suits, three days of rain and one highly anticipated company Water Park picnic, postponed?

You set them free in the back yard.

Even the baby.

My Mammy

(Mammy, Christmas 2004)

November 30th, 1905
September 26th, 2009

My Mammy would have turned 104 this November. Somehow she never seemed that old to me. Of course, the age itself is impressive, as well as the stories of her scaling her roof in her eighties because someone needed to nail down the shingles, or hopping across furniture in her nineties to liven up the dinning room with a new border. Having lived through so much in her life, I think she felt it silly to let life live without her just because of age.

I suppose some people are in your life so naturally that they are simply a part of existence, and it is a shock when you realize they too are affected by time.

She taught me to sew, and my baby dolls had never been so well adorned as they were after a weekend with my Mammy. She let me eat an entire package of spaghetti for dinner, and candy orange slices for breakfast. She taught me to play Skipbo and to crotchet. She let me cuddle in bed with her at night after already staying up late to cuddle on the couch.

As an adult I look back on my memories and realize I may not have known much about the woman who was my Mammy, not in the way that an adult knows another adult. I knew my Mammy as a child knows someone whom they've always known, someone who has always loved them and who has always desired their love in return; and by that consistency, that love, that someone is unequivocally confirmed as good, loving and in a way, holy.

After witnessing my Mammy suffer greatly, both physically and emotionally during the final years of her life, I, as an adult, have come to recognize my Mammy in her suffering. In our final conversation, when her sentences were broken by stifled moans of pain and she rocked gently attempting to endure it, she had still not lost her hope in our Lord: she still faithfully questioned why He had not come for her yet, fully aware that her suffering was only greater affirmation of His presence, not of her abandonment. She seemed to understand, or at least to accept, that her suffering was willed by a loving Father and in it was an opportunity for great redemption.

As I think about my Mammy, I realize that she, in a way beyond childhood impressions, truly was good, loving and holy.