Bits: Sixty and Six

My dear Dad turned sixty this past week.  He had me out doing target practice, laughing at "Duck Dynasty," sharing warm dinners of chili and Mom's spaghetti, amazing me with the stuff he can build from his own two hardworking hands.  He had me remembering my roots, and that is an incredible gift that simply comes from being in his presence. 

My Dad is an amazing man, and I am grateful for the day God gave him to us.  I wish I could tell him, in even semi-adequate words, how much I love and admire him.  I'm pretty sure he knows, at least in part, but he's too humble to get puffed up with just about anything.  Yet I am positively certain that he knows, as I do, that the Britt family is a family who sticks together.  We have each other's backs, the four of us now wonderfully expanded to accommodate another sister and brother plus the grandbabies.  Not a one of us is perfect, but together we are perfected in love.

The mantle's stockings sure have grown in the last decade

Even though this was a milestone birthday, Dad is not one for much hoopla where he is concerned so we try to sneak in just the right amount on such special days.  I turned out some hot spinach and artichoke dip and Mom whipped up a gourmet-like sandwich and soup bar, while a favorite aunt and cousin joined us.  As the cold rain poured outside, we lit the only candle we could find and savored his turning thirty... times two.

Happy, happy birthday father of my heart.  So proud to be your daughter.
****

::Before that birthday bash, however, we held a circus.

Behold the death-defying feats of.... THE Martins' Girls {and the crowd  goes wild!}

::We created our own rock band.  Hope on the guitar, Maddie-Girl on the drums, and Alysse tearing up the vocals.  Who could have guessed, oh say about twenty years ago, that my beloved yellow bedroom would hold three of my own daughters?

::We even had that long-awaited Christmas celebration or two.  The fact that Mom was hanging on for dear life last year and in the middle of us orchestrating the whole shebang this year wasn't lost on any of us.  It was a happy mess.  Isn't life a happy mess indeed?

Billy's face above... classic, every single year.

Ironically enough, just as her PopPop turned sixty our biggest girl is on her way to six.  She has already received one of her biggest birthday wishes as a blanket of fresh white snow covers the ground outside our windows.  Now if it will only clear up in time for us to party... :)

Time flies here in this whole grown-up world I find myself in.  I can't stop it but I can go about every day determined, even when I forget sometimes, to savor it.  Still, six? S-I-X.

Wow.
~Katrina