“I am two years old and the world is my oyster. I am pretty sure that nothing bad could ever happen to me. Yesterday at the zoo, I attempted to climb into the zebra enclosure. I made it past the first barrier before my Uncle Ray saw what I was doing and acted fast to keep me from becoming zebra food.”

C makes her daily commute to the office in Sevierville with her Daddy.

This is what 16-weeks-pregnant-with-baby-number-five looks like.

A fave photo of H that I stole off his Facebook page (I can do that now that he’s friended me…after only THREE YEARS of me asking him to friend me.)

C lounges in nothing but a diaper and her brother E’s lacrosse helmet.

In case you missed it the first time I posted it, here is my 7 year old nephew M’s cartoon creation.

C plays dress-up at Great-Grandmother’s house

E channels his inner Obama

My J-boodles

J and C, wrapped up like a toddler burrito

Me, getting a snuggly kiss from cousin L (known as Rainbow over at his mama’s most excellent blog)

J and another model all made up (remember! You need that much make-up for actual professional photography with lighting and everything; I took this photo with my BlackBerry) for photoshoot for JulieApple bags.

Jon spends time visiting with my grandmother.

Jon and E. Jon will be very sad, I think, when E finally gets too big to climb all over him.

My sweet H, age 18 (!!!)

K and E, the hippest neighbors on Grainger Ave!

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.)

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.

This is what NC looks like when her mama tells her “no.”