Happy Birthday to my Elizabeth!

Today is Elizabeth's birthday!! She is 26 years old today and I am always so very excited to be able to pick up the phone and call to tell her happy birthday!! Until I reunited with Elizabeth, my mom would send me a birthday card every year on Elizabeth's birthday, just to let me know that she'd never forget her and hope that we would be able to know her someday. I don't get the cards anymore, Elizabeth does, and I'm ok with that!!! She is such a big part of my life now and it still amazes me how things turned out and that's just one more thing that I know God has done for me. I called Elizabeth this morning & left her a message letting her know that I have some birthday money for her. She LOVES having money to spend, so unless she has something specific that she wants for her birthday, I usually give her $100 to do what she wants with.

It's kind of nice to have nothing planned for the weekend! I have put myself on the sofa for the entire day with my laptop and a book (still reading A Good Yarn), and hopefully my mystery fever will leave me forever! It's been going away during the day and then sneaking back in the evenings. I'm not feeling bad at all and I don't think I have the stomach virus, so here I am, just resting and hanging out.

Walter is working on the pier today and it looks like he is pretty much finished with it. He is so incredibly smart and talented and i'm glad I have Mr. Wizard (as we affectionately call him) as my very own. He wants to build a covered deck next that will come off of the back porch so that we can move the bbq grill out there and have some more room for entertaining.

I will be leaving on Friday (if i'm cured of the mystery fever) for a weekend in Atlanta for my niece, Daphne's, 1st birthday. I'm going to ride with my mom & step-dad, and Cameron is possibly coming too. That isn't my week with him, so he's supposed to be deciding what he wants to do. It's about an 8 hour drive from here, so it isn't too bad. We will be staying at my cousin's house on Lake Lanier, so i'm excited about that, as well as seeing my cute little niece! I have only seen her once when she was about a month old.

I do appreciate the kind comments about JP and his situation. It is an uncomfortable topic for many people to talk about, but it is my reality and it helps me to talk about it, so hearing positive comments is really helpful to me, so thank you to my commenters!

Questions & Comments:

Chelle asked if Nadda (cat) meows when he's up to his nightly antics. No. And to be honest, he lives his life in "stealth mode" and only comes out of his closet bed if I'm home alone. Lately, he is able to come downstairs when Walter is home and due to the nightly sharing of pudding, they have bonded a little, but otherwise Nadda will freak out and run (picture back claws skidding across the wood floors until he makes it through the house & up the stairs.) Have I mentioned that he is on anxiety medicine? Another interesting thing is that he has JUST started to meow at all in the last few months. Cats learn to meow when they are communicating with people, and he never learned to speak up because he was a feral (wild) cat for the first 5 months of his life. If you don't tame a kitten in the first 8 - 10 weeks of their lives, chances are that their "window is closed" for making friends with people, and in the case like Nadda, where they are still able to make friends, they typically only bond with one person. Recently, I let him go outside with me and now he's started meowing at the door to go back out. He has the FUNNIEST meow i've ever heard, and now that he has learned to do it, he is starting to meow a lot!