Daniel, this one's for you!

I know, this isn't the most attractive picture of Erin, and not much better of Sarah or you, Daniel, but hey, I thought it was a blast to run across it while I was looking for pictures to post on my kids birthday posts. I remember the day well.

Love you!

Alpha & Omega Garrard Kids #2

Can you spell Frustration???!!!! I have spent an hour and a half scanning and storing pictures, only to have half of them not work in the upload of this post! But, today is my baby boy's birthday. Michael is 20 today. I no longer have a teenager in the family. Just like with Sarah (who I posted about just before this) I have a hard time realizing 20 years have passed and Michael has gone from this


To this

and this

To this.

I hope someone in Beckley, West Virginia helped make my boy's birthday a great one and he got to blow out some candles! Happy Birthday, Mike!!!

Alpha & Omega Garrard Kids

This is a day late, but well intended! Sarah's birthday was yesterday. I CAN NOT believe it's been 31 years since she graced our world. To say that she has been a joy is a complete understatement. Now, there have been less than joyful moments, of course, but all in all, I'm danged proud of her and the woman she has become. It's hard to realize that she has gone from this

To this

And this

to this!

I love you, Sarah!

Stressed out!

I have had, without a doubt, one of THE most stressful weeks of my work-life. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that I had to do in 3 days what normally we would have had 2 weeks to do. And, I'm still not finished with EVREYthing, but have ANOTHER deadline on Wednesday. Fun times, in the CCSD Transportation department in the summer. Good thing I like my job. Good thing, good thing, good thing.

Now, I'm going to take some Ibuprofen, go have dinner with our bestest friends, Terry & Matt and come home, crash and hopefully, enjoy tomorrow. I wish I had a pool. I think I'd float until I was a prune. All the while worrying about skin cancer.

Isn't that kind of like life?

Father's Day

Mother's Day gets a lot of attention, deservedly so. But, Father's Day, not so much. Why is that? I mean, let's face it. We couldn't be mothers without those fathers!

Father's often don't want a big fuss made over them. It's not their style. Usually. I'm sure there's an exception or two out there. We all have in our heads the idea of what it means to be a "good" parent, mother or father. But, I'm STILL looking for the owner's manual that I thought surely would come with the kids I birthed. At times, I'm pretty sure the FATHER had hidden it and/or memorized it. He always seemed so SURE of what needed to be done/not done, said/not said, even/especially when I wasn't. But, I don't think that father's have any more of a clue most of the time than mothers do. They just have to act like they do. And, I think sometimes that's half the battle, right there. I mean, someone has to make a decision and run with it. Time will tell if it turned out to be a good one or not.

Mothers are allowed to cry. Even EXPECTED to, sometimes. But, dads, while allowed to cry at really touching things, definitely aren't expected to. It breaks the man rules. Gotta be tough. Gotta be DAD. I would think though, that that has to be a hard act to carry on all the time. A woman can cry, rant, meltdown and blame it on hormones, nature, Oprah, whatever. Dad's don't get that luxury.

I want to honor all the great DAD's out there on this Father's Day Eve, especially Howard, Nathan, Tyler & Kevin. Thanks for hanging in there, being patient when you really just want to punch the wall, working every day, even if you hate it, because you're the DAD. Thanks for bringing home the bacon, picking up the dog poo, emptying the trash, mowing the lawn, cleaning the pool, playing with the kids and fixing stuff. Thanks for NOT drinking, drugging, or gambling the money away.

Thanks for being DAD.

Family Campout #2 Mt. Charleston

As most of you know, we had our 2nd Big Ol' Family Campout this past weekend @ Mt. Charleston. While it's not as green as one might like, it's high enough to be a nice, cool respite from the heat of the Vegas valley. Some stayed the night, some came up just for the day. But, it was a great, relaxing day and fun, fun, fun.

This is Briggs. The youngest one there.
Mackenzie & Zachary seriously checking out the Palm. Or whatever it was.

I got this shot of Brock. He was all by himself and had just been playing in the dirt. Too bad the sun washed out his cute face. He was serious about what he had been doing!

David and Shana.

Seth had been just a tad bit grumpy and Erin got him to smile. I LOVE his smile.

The day wasn't without it's injuries. This is Sydney's. I think it looks worse than it was. She had such a death grip on that thumb she could have had a tourniquet on it. I'm not sure that's the correct spelling of tournequit, tourniquet, turnequit, t-u-r-n..I quit!

Monica and Erin.

This is Gus. He is cute. He looks just like his daddy did. He is precious.

There were more pictures and I'm sure others will blog/post them. But, I found it interesting to sit and just listen to snippits of conversations. This is a sampling of what I heard:

"Do NOT let him get pubic hair. ANYwhere on his body!"

"You've GOT to come to Scrapfest this year!!!"

"Well, there's new new, but we're still not done with the new new."

"Gosh, I wish that fire pit would smoke some more".

" Now, there's a kid who got his money's worth out of today".

"That's your penalty for not checking that thing".

Now, you know who you are that said these things! Out of context some of them are really funny. Heck, some of them were pretty funny IN context. But, the funniest thing I heard all weekend was this:

"Bifidus regularis? More like Crampus Maximus!"

I doubt anyone else thinks we're as funny as we do. But, this is the BEST family one could be a part of. We rock!

Ah, Motherhood

Today was a great day for our family, as Tyler & Sarah blessed baby Briggs. Another milestone. There have been 11 of these, so far for us. Baby blessings that is, of the grandchild sort. Five of the children sort. They are all special. Sweet, hectic for the parents who have to get everything ready, loud afterward at lunch, especially as the kid count increases. Yet, would I have it any other way? "No way", to quote Brooklyn. It is an incredible blessing to us that we have had all of our kids live in the same town as we do for as long as we have. One day, when I die, hopefully a LONG, LONG time from now, I would wish to do it with all these people I love so much surrounding me, sending me on the great beyond. I don't think I would want to die alone. But, hey, time will tell how/when that plays out and I probably won't get a lot of say in it.

In the meantime, I lurk on the blog of my good friend, Sheila's daughter, Juliana. Today, she posted the column of Anna Quinlan, a journalist for Newsweek. Here it is. Maybe you can relate:


All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. Itake great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the samebooks I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations--what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were putdown on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sortsof infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too. Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. Theday when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (Sheinsisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking? But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow ofthe swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because ofwhat I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.