We decided to go to Bell Buckle this weekend to get out of Jon’s hair, as it’s tax season. Since he’s an accountant, he has A LOT of work to do on the weekends this month (and next.) H was in Atlanta for a few days visiting with friends with some girl he identified only to me as “Marie,” so he wasn’t with us. But J, C, E and J’s friend G and I went together and had a grand time. (H is back from Atlanta now, and I’m still trying to get a clear answer on the mystery that is “Marie.” Let me tell you that getting information on a female acquaintance out of a very private 18 year old male requires a lot of tenacious persistence on the part of said male’s mother.)

The night before our weekend excursion, E helped me get his little sister to sleep by pretending to fall asleep with her himself (she likes that.) But then he actually fell asleep. So did she.

On Saturday morning, we hit the road, but not before making a stop at the carwash place where we had the interior of the car decontaminated before picking up J’s friend G, who was going to go with us. C LOVED the auto carwash. It both mesmerized her and terrified her. Here she and E are – the latter looking a bit like a young Unabomber in this photo – watching our car get run thru the – in C’s words – “very, VERY scary soapy machine.”

My sister and her fam had preceded us to Bell Buckle the day before, so C was very glad to find that NC was already there, waiting for her. The girls enjoyed their favorite activity: taking a bath together.

C was also very glad to see her cousin N, who is just about 9 months older than she and NC.

NC spent some quality alone time playing toddler app games on my sister’s iPhone. She is only 2 and she already knows how to pull up her favorite color and shape sorting games on the phone, and how to play them and change games when she’s ready.

We absolutely loved having J’s friend G along with us for the weekend. He’s a fantastic kid – polite, funny and enthusiastic about jumping into the chaotic maelstrom that is a house party weekend with our family.

Robert & Nicole had to go to a charity event Saturday night, so we made them pose for photos, like the prom.

In fact, I made them pose just as if they were at the prom.

While we were at Robert and Nicole’s all weekend, C developed a deep, obsessive attachment to one of cousin N’s toys – an animatronic puppy whom she named “Spots.” After she carried it around for 24 hours straight without letting go of it once, Aunt Nicole kindly offered to let her “borrow” Spots to take back to Knoxville. She was so excited by this offer that she immediately announced that we needed to leave for Knoxville RIGHT NOW, and she threw a fit when we told her we weren’t going yet. She thought that if she didn’t take Aunt Nicole up on the offer right away, somebody might have a change of heart and take Spots away from her.

When we finally did go home on Sunday evening, she clutched Spots the whole way back, including during the NUMEROUS bathroom breaks necessarily involved in a 3.5 hour car trip with two teenagers, a 12 year old, a toddler and a pregnant woman. Here you see C and Spots touring public restrooms all across Tennessee.

Oh, and the best quote of the weekend came from my grandmother, while chatting with me and my dear friends since middle school, David & Harry, who were also in Bell Buckle for the weekend. She told us that, “All of the dictators I’ve known have actually been quite nice in person.” (For the record, those dictators include but may not be limited to Baby Doc, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and the Shah of Iran.)

EDIT: Post removed after someone (not sure who yet. We’ll discuss it later if child feels like it) actively upset my child regarding the contents of the post. Thus, my child called me from school just now and asked me to delete it.

Now that my children are old enough to read what I write (and have friends and friends’ parents who read what I write) they always get the final say on what gets blogged about and what doesn’t. So whatever the reasons or circumstances, if one of the children is uncomfortable for any reason with something I’ve written on my blog, it goes away with no further discussion. They’re the boss(es) in that regard.

And that’s what’s happened here.

(But I’m still laughing about our conversation this morning.)

Katie

Every time I start to come to grips with the fact that my father is gone, really gone, I get punched in the heart by something unexpected.

Tonight I attended the receiving of friends for the father of a dear friend, someone my age, whom I’ve known since the first month of our freshman year of college. His father’s simple, dignified coffin was placed in the corner of the room, draped in an American flag. I saw it and tears started welling up as I remembered the flag that draped my own father’s coffin, only 17 months ago.

Then tonight, I was going through some files on my computer and stumbled onto this photo of my father, carrying my little brother on his shoulders. I saw that great smile of his, beaming out at me from the picture, and suddenly I had this wonderfully painful, totally visceral memory of how much I loved being carried on his shoulders, just like that. He was a tall man – 6′3″ – and when he hoisted Robert or Betsy or me up there, it was like being on top of the world.

I loved my Daddy so much. These days, I miss him a lot. I miss him far more now than I did in the months right after he died, because it didn’t seem real yet – I think I was kind of in shock. Plus, it had all been so hard dealing with his mental illness in the years before his sudden death. As I’ve said before, I had already done a lot of grieving for my father before he actually left his physical body.

But as the months go by, I am more and more able to think of him as he really was, as he really intended to be. I love the beaming optimism I see in the face of that not-yet-30 year old man in the photo, full of hope and self confidence and big plans for himself and his family. I still try every day to make him proud, to live up to what he expected of me.

C telling me VERY LOUDLY that no matter what annoying intervention she tries, her big brother H simply will not wake up from his coma-like sleep state on our couch.

Find out over in my latest blog post at Babble (hint: it’s holiday-related).

This is a photo of my little brother Robert hiking in the Arizona mountains last week.

For those who knew our father, I’ve gotta ask: could Robert look ANY MORE like Hank? I don’t think so. It’s somethin’

C calls her Magnadoodle her “Noodle.” She loves the Noodle, and she loves to draw on it with her Daddy. This is a tracing on the Noodle of her hand, and his.

“Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.” – Martin Mull

I am working on a feature story for a magazine about what traits and behaviors happy families share. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this myself lately. Is my own family “happy?” By some people’s measures, the answer would be “no.” I continue to have significant struggles understanding the choices my eldest child is making, and we clash over them frequently. My worries about him cause me deep pain on a level I never imagined possible before hitting this part of parenting. And then there is the fact that I am divorced, meaning that J and E (and previously, before he moved out, H) have to shuttle between two houses. The end of my first marriage was indescribably painful – I am forever scarred by it, no matter how much I’ve moved on and made a new life – and the fallout has taken many years to settle. And another factor in the “not happy” column would be that Jon and I have a big family and a lot of responsibilities, so money is always tight and there never seems to be enough of it. Our old house needs a lot of work and we don’t have savings like we should. That’s always stressful.

Despite these things, I would still classify my family as happy. I have a really great marriage and I have four children whom I adore, and who love each other like crazy. Although we bug each other a lot, I am very close to my siblings, and my extended family. I love all my nieces and nephews, and just as I did when I was growing up, my children consider their own siblings and all of their cousins to be their best friends. My children have loving grandparents, both paternal and maternal, and many busybody aunts and uncles keeping a close eye on them. We’re happy. Yeah. We are.

But why? Why do I think of MY family as happy despite some less than perfect circumstances when I know other people who look better on paper, but who – if you asked them – would tell you that their family – both nuclear and extended – “has problems” or even come right out and say that they are unhappy? Is it all an attitude thing? Am I just in denial? I mean, every family has challenges and warts and bruises. No family’s circumstances are perfect. So why do some families let these circumstances define them, while others do not?

I have my own ideas about this set of questions, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Do you consider your family happy? What does it even mean to be a “happy family?” Let me know in the comments below.

Jon with my grandmother.