Happy Birthday, Anne Gracie!

It's that time of year again -- Anne Gracie's birthday!

If you aren't already familiar with Anne's wonderful warm witty books, get thee to Amazon or Book Depository or Barnes and Noble or your favorite neighborhood bookshop and start ordering all of her terrific back list.

If you have already read them, you know what I'm talking about, and you'll be delighted to know that she's got another great story nearly ready to send to her publisher. I've had the pleasure of reading bits and pieces of Nash Renfrew's story when she feels charitable enough to send me a piece. I'm loving it.

So rather than encourage her to go out and celebrate her birthday, instead I suggested she stay home and write. There will be plenty of time for merry-making AFTER Nash has been safely bundled off to the publisher (but he could make a quick trip by my house on his way, just so I can find out how it ends, please!)

Happy birthday, Anne!

Thank you for your friendship, your sense of humor, your maravelous books, your wonderful heroes and delightful heroines. Thank you for your wisdom and your laughter.

Thank you for making me make George pull his socks up and be a hero. Ditto for Demetrios, Christo, Seb, PJ, and Spence. They thank you, too.

And Nash will thank you if you'll please just go back now and get to work!

One More Birthday Boy

This is indeed the birthday week at our house -- finishing off today with our oldest grandson, Eric, who is seventeen.

I don't know how Eric could be old enough to drive cars and have a girlfriend and play hoops and score touchdowns, not to mention sing in his high school choir.

It seems like just the other day he was playing "western town" with the Fisher-Price guys.

Wasn't it last week we were reading alternate chapters of Seaman: the Dog Who Went With Lewis and Clark?

And it couldn't have been more than last summer that he was taking our dear dogs Jake and Cookie on walks.

How could he have three younger brothers -- one of them 11 and two of them 5?

Not possible!

It couldn't have been ten years ago that he and The Prof and I and Gunnar drove to Montana -- with Eric navigating. That boy could read maps before he could talk.

It was a memorable trip. He got to throw buffalo cake to the buffalo on our friends' ranch. He got to climb up to the falls near Bozeman and throw rocks over the edge. He got to learn about dinosaur digs at the Museum of the Rockies. And every day he wrote about it in a journal so his mom and dad would have a record of what he did (and because one of his grandmas is a writer and the other is a librarian and we both believed that he should write something, too).

He did.

He and I made it into a book, complete with pictures, when we got home. Just the other day I found our copy of his book, Eric's Excellent Adventure when I was cleaning out the back bedroom -- the bedroom which has been through lots of kids, including his own father, but which as often as not is called Eric's room.

Because he was the first -- and for 5 years an only -- we did a lot of stuff together. He was my right-hand man when we went down to Kansas to help his aunt and uncle get ready to move to Texas.

He was the only one, at times, who could get his two year old cousin to be reasonable. He has that ability -- to be cool and calm and sensible when everyone else is not.

His mom says he's a lot like his grandma. She means his other grandma -- trust me.

She's right, too. His other grandma is a terrific person. So is he.

Last year we got to watch him play baseball on the same team with his dad one night. This year we got to watch him play football on national TV. This season, for the first time, he and I get to cheer for the same pro football team -- his team, the Vikings -- because my quarterback is his quarterback now.

It's fun. He's fun. It's true what they say: grandchildren are great.

Especially this one.

He has brought tremendous joy into our lives. And he set the bar very high for all the subsequent grandchildren. They have a lot to live up to after Eric.

Happy birthday, E!

The Birthday Mom -- and Boys!

This is birthday week at our house.

My mom celebrated her 90th on Tuesday -- but wouldn't let me take my camera to her party. So I can't show you the event here. She said, enough! And she meant it. So here's one from when she wasn't 90.

There are other birthdays, too.

My favorite son-in-law's birthday is today. And he's camera-phobic, too. So I can't show you him celebrating, either. He's also my only son-in-law, which he continually reminds me. But that doesn't make him any less a favorite. Once he saved my daughter's life. How can I not love the man?

And then there are the twins.

Cooper and Carson are five today. They have a camera at their house, but I'm not there. I just talked to them on the phone and their mom says go ahead and put up summer pics -- they haven't changed all that much.

Well, no.

I can't tell them apart half the time now and I couldn't tell them apart half the time then. But I love them dearly even when I don't know which one I'm talking to.

They looked a lot different five years ago. They weren't supposed to arrive in October. They weren't due until two days after Christmas. We had a rough few weeks.

But as you can see, they've turned out fine. The wonders of modern medicine have done a great job. They are hale and hearty and make life interesting.

Happy birthday, boys! Love you!

Happy Birthday Dear Daughter!

It's my daughter's birthday today.

She's reached a milestone which makes me feel old. But it's okay because it probably makes her feel old, too, and so we can be old together.

She is my only daughter and my oldest child, and believe me when I say she set the bar very high for all those boys that followed.

If I'd only ever had one kid, I wouldn't have understood what all those other parents were saying when they'd wring their hands and moan about what their children were up to now.

Mine, of course, was perfect. Well, she was. Pretty much. Still is.

Of course when we sent her off to school, her teachers thought otherwise. They agreed she was smart, hard-working, determined, hard-working, smart, determined -- oh, and going to do things her own way.

They also said, "Why doesn't she turn her work in on time?"

That's the other thing she can be --- about things that matter --- a bit of a perfectionist. When the teacher said, "Draw Bill and Jill at the duck pond," the other kids, my boys included, would draw two stick figures, a circle and some vague rendition of a bird. . . and move on.

Not my daughter.

Everyone else was finished and ready to go to lunch and she was still sitting at her desk, totally focused -- drawing argyle socks on Jill.

She hadn't even decided what kind of duck was going to be at the pond yet. That would mean getting out the bird identification book, reading about the migratory patterns of ducks, figuring out where the pond was and the time of year the ducks were migrating and which ones were likely to be at the particular latitude and longitude at that particular time of year.

And no, it didn't matter that she was in first grade when she did this.

It was pretty typical.

She was a joiner and a volunteer, and she rode horses every Saturday at a friend's farm about 10 miles from here. Luckily for me, she got a ride to the horses. But ferrying her to and from all the things she had joined or volunteered for kept me busier than all of her brothers combined.

It's fun to watch now as she's still doing the same thing, but she has to get herself -- and her own daughter -- wherever they're volunteering or joining now.

She was a Girl Scout and could sell you cookies mute and with her eyes closed. She could have sold you the Mississippi River and all its bridges just by smiling at you. It turns out her daughter can do the same thing -- 100 times over.

Now she's a Girl Scout troop leader and, trust me, the Girl Scouts in her troop are the luckiest kids in Texas. They're going camping this weekend. Lucky kids.

I don't get to see her nearly as often as I'd like as there's about 1000 miles between us. The one blessing of her daughter getting mono last fall was that I got to go be with them for three weeks while granddaughter recovered.

So I'm grateful every day for inexpensive phone rates, for memories that always make me smile, for Mom camp every summer which I wouldn't miss for the world because she and I have sooo much fun (her daughter loves summer sports camp, but she asked last summer if she could come to Mom Camp too when she got 'old enough.').

Mostly I'm grateful she's my daughter.

Happy birthday, kid. I love you!

From Sid the Cat

Salutations and Felicitations on your birthday, dear Kate!

The Lady Across the Pond (TLATP to those who know her well -- aka Ms McAllister) has invited me to be a regular, albeit sporadic, contributor to her blog.

She has even, you will note, given me sidebar billing.

This is so I can send personal good wishes and head butts and purrs to my dear Lady of the House, Kate Walker, on her birthday!

If you have not gone to my dear Lady's blog and wished her the best of the day, please do so. Or, if you are lazy, Anne says you can leave them here in the comments and I am to see that Kate reads them. But I feel sure you will make the extra effort to click on her name and allow her to simply read them on her own space whilst eating bonbons and sipping tea or that light-coloured stuff she thinks of as tea, which is what you get when you wave a tea bag in the direction of the cup.

But I digress.

I could extol her virtues endlessly, but it would be teatime before I got finished and I really can't miss meals. And if I kept on, that cat Dylan would show up withh a 'pome' he had writ, and he'd want to recite it, and we can't be having that.

Suffice to say, dear Lady of the House, that I wish you the very best today and all the coming year (as does TLATP), and I hope that you have a salmon, er, present filled day and that you will share it all with those of us who are on your side of the pond and wish you well (even that floozie, Flora, if she behaves herself).

Your official blog contributor and handsome esteemed noble self-effacing feline of distinction,

SIR SIDNEY ST JOHN WILLOUGHBY PORTLY-LUMMOX, DLitt Oxon, Earl of Blubberhouses, Thane of Spital-in-the-Street, etc etc etc, ACOSB (a cat of superior breeding).

Cover's Coming!

I got the cover for the Mills & Boon Modern hardback of Antonides' Forbidden Wife in the post the other day.

Actually, not just the cover, I got the books themselves. It seems ages ago since I wrote PJ and Ally's story. So long ago that I had to stop right in the middle of Mom Camp -- well, really right in the middle of doing the laundry -- and read it (so did my daughter) to be sure I still remembered it.

I do.

I even remembered how it ended. Also discovered that the suggestions my editor made did, as I'd suspected, make it a better book.

I have to scan the cover, which I haven't done yet, before I can post it. But stay tuned. It will happen in the next day or two. Right now I'm up to my eyeballs (I was going to say up to my teeth, but given the teeth issue this week, that seemed to be tempting fate) in kids and laundry.

We are also going on a boat ride tomorrow at the end of Mom Camp, which should be fun.

The kids are coming along. And then we're celebrating the almost 8 year old's birthday (for next week) and doing more laundry.

Birthdays!

Back!

Wonderful trip. Hope you all had a great time without me. Sorry I only missed you a little, but the granddaughter more than made up for all the great people here. When I get the pics downloaded, I will bore you with a few.

In the meantime, it's birthday celebration time! While I was gone, I missed Michelle Reid's. So, very sorry, Michelle, but you were thought of. And I'm glad you got your revisions finished and are taking a deep breath and -- I hope - resting between books.

And happy birthday to Mitch who was FIVE yesterday (and no, not months, though sometimes he acts like it!). We'll celebrate today, Mitch!

Also, happy birthday today to my wonderful daughter-in-law Marie who made me so welcome these last few days. She and son and granddaughter gave me a memorable vacation with them. I wish I'd been there to babysit tonight so the adults could go out to dinner and the granddaughter and I could hang out (except she goes to be with the chickens, so I wouldn't get to play with her much in the evening -- unless I was corrupting her! -- and I wouldn't want to do that because she's a very good sleeper and her parents have worked hard at it.

And a special and wonderful happy birthday to my dear friend Kate Walker who shares Marie's birthday and thus proves that May 7th must be a stupendous day to be born. Kate, too, just survived the revisions process and is recuperating. So enjoy your book-free days, my dear. Though I know you are still very very very busy!

Anyone who wants to leave birthday greetings for them here, I'll be sure to pass them along -- and they may get here to see them themselves. Certainly Mitch will!