Have you all enjoyed the multiple posts today?  I would post several times a day if I’d let myself — I have that much stuff to tell about the girls!  Thankfully for you, I restrain myself to one, maybe two posts a day… well, other than today.

We’ve seen a LOT of September dates: from Olivia’s trip to the flower garden to Juliana’s shopping spree at CVS to Aviean’s selection of flowers for her mother and even Angelina’s trip to Cracker Barrel for a long lunch with me. That means it’s time to hear about what I took MacKenzie to do for her September date!

For MacKenzie’s date, we went to one of my favorite Knoxville stores — Bath Junkie — and MacKenzie got to create her own bottle of bubble bath!  First, she looked through over 200 scents to pick out the one that was perfect for her.  Once she had selected “strawberry kisses” as her scent, we headed over to the sink so that MacKenzie could have a “spa hand treatment.”  Then, it was time to have her scent mixed up and placed in a bottle for us to take home!

As you can probably guess, this date was a hit with a certain girl named MacKenzie!  I wish this store wasn’t so far from my town because I’d love to take the other members of the fab five to make their own bubble bath, too.  One of my favorite memories of being a pre-teen was going into my favorite “bath store” and picking out those little bath oil beads and other types of bubble bath.  What girl doesn’t love a good bubble bath?

And that, my friends, concludes my five September one-on-one dates with those silly little girls.  Just in time since a whole new month of dates starts tomorrow, right?  Yikes!

For Angelina’s date this month, I took her to have lunch at Cracker Barrel.  It’s one of her favorite places to eat (and mine, too!).  While we waited for our table, we played a game of checkers on the front porch.  Who doesn’t love rocking chairs when fall is in the air?

When they called our names to go inside, I stood up to head inside.  Angelina popped over to where I was standing and took my hand in hers to walk in.  I never cease to be amazed at how she reaches out for love.

We had a great lunch together, just eating and talking about things going on in her world.  When we finally got ready to leave, I couldn’t believe how long we had been having lunch together.  I guess time really does fly when girls get to talking!

Next is the last date of the month, which happens to be MacKenzie!  I’ll post it a little later this afternoon.

For Aviean’s September date with me, I decided to mix things up a bit.  Her mom had a birthday this past weekend, so I decided that we would spend our date time working on a card and a gift for her mommy.  We had the best time!

The first thing we did was create a card at home.  Aviean hasn’t learned how to write all her letters yet, so she asked me to help her spell out a message inside the card.  For her mother’s birthday, she wanted to write (and I quote): “Celebration!  You are birthday mommy.  Chocolate!”  I can’t tell you how serious she was about making sure I spelled the word “celebration” correctly.

I decided to let Aviean pick what she would give her mother for her birthday, but that quickly went south once Aviean began insisting that we buy her a baby stroller… like, for an actual infant.  I shot that choice down and, after disapproving additional gifts ranging from a set of salt and pepper shakers to a new child, I steered Aviean in the direction of a nice bouquet of flowers.

Aviean selected “crazy daisies” for her mother and very proudly presented them to her once we headed back over to their apartment.  As you’ll remember, Aviean is the only one of my fabulous five that has her mother in her life.  It was so much fun to get to do something for her mother!

Next up is Angelina, whose post will go live around lunchtime!

Over the course of today, the very last day of September, I’m going to put up four different posts that show my “girls’ dates” with members of the fabulous five.  Each month, I take each of the girls on a “date” so that I can make sure I’m spending time alone and focusing on each of them at least once a month.  I’ve already shown you Olivia’s date earlier this month, so today’s four posts will give you a peek into my dates this month with Juliana, Aviean, Angelina and MacKenzie!

First up?  Miss Juliana!  For Juliana’s September date, we went to CVS to do a little shopping for our house.  I know you’re probably thinking this sounds like a lame date, but Juliana is my little “homemaker.”  She loves to help me with things around the house, playing baby dolls, etc.  I told her we were going to buy a few things we needed and she was thrilled.  You have never seen a child more excited to get to pick out toilet paper than this little girl.

Juliana did such a good job helping me get our household supplies that she got to pick out a little treat at the end of our “shopping trip.”  She loved getting to help me get “twings for da hwouse” and asked if we could go to CVS for all of our “dates.”  The truth is that, if I was the little girl getting taken on dates, that’s probably the exact type of date I would have liked, too — I was quite the little “housewife” as a little girl, too.  Juliana and I might not share a bloodline, but we apparently share a love of household toiletries!

Up next?  Aviean’s date for the month of September!  I’ll post it sometime around 10 a.m. EST.

It was a hard day at the doctor’s office today.  I cried the whole way home, but when I went to pick up the girls from daycare and school, I made myself promise myself that I wouldn’t cry in front of them.

We had tacos for dinner…

… and now we have all had showers and are getting ready for bed.

– — –

I was getting ready to shut down the computer, when Olivia walked up to me with my high heels on and a request to have her “pwicture” taken.  And thus I present: Olivia and I, with a towel still wrapped around my hair.

The last picture is my favorite.  It’s classic Amy Beff and Olivia, no tears to be found.  And now, I am going to go get in their bed and read them storybooks and then I am going to get in my bed and go to sleep without crying.

P.S. — Olivia is kissing my arm as I write this.

P.P.S. — Olivia is still wearing my high heels.

P.P.P.S. — Olivia just said “I am Amy Beff.”

I mentioned yesterday that, this past weekend, I took four members of the fabulous five with me to downtown Chattanooga for a little housewarming party Katie was having.  I loved living with Katie while we were in college; we got into everything from Jello to chocolate pudding to Little Debbies. I’m so glad she’s back “home” near me.

Since Katie had previously lived a couple of hours from me, she hasn’t seen me with the fabulous five in action.  She’s read about them on this blog and heard my stories on the phone, but she had never experienced them for herself.  I can’t tell you how excited I was to take them to her house.

I want to illustrate something about the girls to you that has felt too difficult to explain, but I think the pictures will help make my point.  Keep in mind as you look at these next few pictures that the little girls didn’t know Katie before we arrived that night.

The morning after the party, I got a text from Katie –

“When you’re around them, you can tell just how much they crave love.”

Until people are around the girls, I don’t think you can fully grasp how much love from maternal figures they crave.  I try not to go into too many details about their lives on something as public as a blog, but you just have no idea how much maternal love they crave.  They have been without it for far too long.

Look back at those pictures again.  Do you see the way they’re piled onto Katie’s lap while she sits on her living room floor?  Look how MacKenzie is playing with Katie’s hair while Katie holds her in the bedroom.  Did you notice that the picture caught Angelina in the process of running over to Katie to demand that she be held, too?  Look at them again, with the knowledge that these girls didn’t even know Katie other than the fact that she was one of my roommates in college.

I could love those little girls from the moment they wake up in the morning until the moment their heads hit the pillow at night and it still wouldn’t even begin to be enough love for them.  They’ve had a deficit for awhile now.

And that’s why I’m trying to make as many love deposits as I can.

I just wrote a long post about what I did over the weekend and then I lost it.  Gone, forever, into the internet abyss.  I can’t bring myself to write it out again, so today we embrace our friend list format:

1. On Friday, after finishing a huge event at work, I left the office early with the intention of going home and taking a nap.  On the way to my house, however, I pictured MacKenzie’s sweet face and decided to call her dad to see if a last-minute trip to visit me might work for them.  An hour and a half later, I arrived in Knoxville to find MacKenzie sitting on the stairs outside her apartment complex, baby doll in one arm, duffel bag in the other.  I was so glad I chose MacKenzie over the nap.

2. When we got back to Cleveland, we picked up Angelina, Juliana and Olivia (Aviean, the last member of my fabulous five, was with her grandmother this past weekend).  We went to my house where we fixed dinner, made popcorn on the stove, picked out a movie and all piled onto the couch.  Snuggles, the naughty puppy, made a rouge attack on Olivia’s popcorn which sent us all into giggles… well, except for Olivia.

3. On Saturday morning, I woke up around 6 a.m. to find Juliana and Olivia standing by my bed.  When I opened my eyes, Juliana turned to Olivia and said “Let’s get in bed wif Amy Beff!”  You will be impressed to know that my twin bed was able to fit myself, a four year old, a three year old, their baby dolls and two rather rambunctious puppies.

4. We set out to do some errands on Saturday with one of them being especially fun: a local craft store was having an American Girl doll event!

Please notice Olivia’s pink sunglasses perched on top of her head.

5. After nap time (for the little girls at least), a babysitter in the form of one of my college girls, Anna, came over to the house.   Surreal: having no children of your own, yet needing to search for a babysitter.  You should have heard me going over the rules with the girls before I left; I am getting better and better about faking this whole motherhood thing every day.

6. The reason I needed a babysitter was because Saturday was Aviean’s mom’s birthday!  In case you’re new to my blog, Aviean is the only girl in my fab five who is related to me (her father is my cousin) and is the only girl in the fab five who has her mother in her life.   Over the last couple of months, God has worked it out for her mother, Brooke, and I to develop a relationship that continually surprises us both.  To celebrate her birthday, we (along with her friend Brittany) went out for pedicures and then grabbed dinner at O’Charley’s.  It is the first time I’ve gotten to spend time with Brooke without Aviean around and I was so grateful for the opportunity.  In addition to Aviean, Brooke has two other children so I know she was enjoying having a girls’ night out, too!

7.  When I got back to the house, babysitter Anna informed me that Olivia had earned herself two timeouts while I was gone but that Snuggles had been the worst behaved child under my roof that evening.  This was not surprising news given that silly puppy’s recent behavior streak.

8. I loaded the little girls into my car and we headed to downtown Chattanooga for a fun little adventure — a housewarming party for one of my old college roommates, Katie!  If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ll remember that when I began writing it, I lived with Katie (I had just finished grad school and she was finishing her undergrad degree).  About a year and a half ago, I stood as a bridesmaid beside Katie as she married Eric.  They’ve been living in Georgia since then but have recently moved back to our area!  There are no words for how excited I am to have one of my best friends in the world back within a 30 minute drive of where I live.

9. On Sunday morning, after Juliana woke me up with her orders for me to get in the kitchen and cook something for her, I got the four girls dressed and then we went and picked up Aunt Cate’s favorite breakfast before driving out to her house to surprise her before she left for work.  Cate’s fiance continues to be in Iraq and this past weekend was a hard one for all of them as one of the soldiers in his group was killed in battle.  If deployment isn’t hard enough on its own, there’s nothing like death in battle to make it hurt even more.  Cate was having a tough weekend after hearing the news, so I knew that a surprise visit from four of her favorite little girls would be exactly what she needed.  I wish I had of videoed her face when she came to the door and found them standing there with blueberry biscuits in hand!

10. Church was next on the agenda; I asked Ryan to take all four girls to church as I had a project for work I had to go do.  As part of the religion class I’m teaching this semester, my students are serving the community in a variety of ways including working with the elderly, particularly patients suffering from dementia (right now, you’re all thankful that I wasn’t your religion professor in college, aren’t you?).  When church was out, I picked the girls up so that they could join us at the nursing home.  We spend Sunday afternoon interacting with the patients; I don’t know which was more fun, watching the elderly women fawn over my little girls or watching my college students fawn over my little girls.  No one can resist the allure of any of the fabulous five.

11. After we finished serving at the nursing home, I took Ryan’s girls back to him and then headed back to Knoxville to return MacKenzie to her dad.  I always dread taking her home, only because it reminds me of going back and forth between my own parents’ houses when I was a little girl.  When we were about thirty miles from Knoxville, MacKenzie began asking me if I would move into the empty apartment that sits directly above her dad’s apartment.  The distance is hard on my heart, but I can never forget that the distance is harder on MacKenzie’s heart.

12. After I took MacKenzie home, I headed over to a restaurant to have dinner with my mom and her husband to celebrate her birthday.  Her birthday is actually this weekend, but I’ll be in Atlanta shooting a wedding so we decided to celebrate early.  The older I get, the funnier it is to spend time with my mother just because of how different we are from each other (and how alike we are in other ways).  As we were sitting at the table, my mom saw a couple walking into the restaurant and mentioned that they are her neighbors.  Before I could say anything, mom quickly instructed me to not act very friendly because she didn’t actually know their names and that could be awkward.  I should start videoing my visits home because they are prime reality show material.

13. After finishing dinner, I headed back to Cleveland where I collapsed in my bed and awaited Monday morning.  If you think you’re tired just from reading this post, imagine how I felt.  I was glad for the workweek to get here just so I could get some rest!

And now they have brought me home to my quiet house

where I will try to keep the loneliness from sucking me in tonight.

You have to be careful or it sucks you right into its vortex

before you even know you’ve been caught.

Everybody wants somebody to come home to on rainy nights.

It’s a rainy Monday morning here in Tennessee.  I’m wearing my favorite wellies and thinking about how, even though it is sometimes tempting to be discouraged by Mondays, I can’t bring myself to dislike them because that’s 1/7 of every week of my life.  If you want to know the truth, and I hesitate to tell you this because I’m afraid you’ll throw tomatoes at me, but Monday tends to be one of my very favorite days of the week.

I had a fabulous weekend, but I haven’t uploaded the pictures to my laptop yet, so I’m going to wait until tomorrow to tell you about all the fun.  In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy knowing how Juliana, age four, woke me up yesterday morning at 6:20 a.m.:

“Get up and get in the kitchen ’cause I’m STARVING.”

Well, then.

We’re only a few weeks away from my cousin Marisa’s wedding, so last weekend, several of the bridesmaids came in town and we had a couple of events for her.  First up?  Why, the bachelorette party, of course.

I picked a really chic restaurant in downtown Chattanooga and we planned for everyone to meet at the restaurant on Friday evening.  I headed down a bit before the group so that I could get everything together.  On the way there, I did a little “pre-gaming” in the car:

What can I say?  I’m wild.

Also, I took a picture of my backseat when I arrived at the restaurant because I was so happy about that dang backseat.  I somehow managed to clean out all the food crumbs and Sillybandz that the fab five have left in my backseat as well as move their booster seats inside my car.  What you’re about to see below is a backseat full of nothing but pure bachelorette goodness.

Our table was in the bar (wild!) and I had little things to dress it up a bit.   I got little white gift bags for each girl in our party and put Ring Pops in them because every girl at a bachelorette party needs a little bling-bling.   I also picked out seven little bachelorette-themed gifts for Marisa to open during the dinner; she had a box (and a coordinating gift) for each day of the week.

I also made a veil with the help of a princess crown, netting, ribbon and a hot glue gun that is now dead to me due to the number of times I accidentally burnt myself using it.

Before long, the bride-to-be had arrived!  She’s sitting with one of her best friends, Danielle, who flew in from California for the weekend.

Unfortunately, my pictures of the bachelorette party stop there because hello, it was a bachelorette party.  Use your imagination.  I mean, unless you’re under the age of 18, a male or my mother.  In that case, just continue onto the next paragraph and forget I even mentioned anything involving the word “bachelorette.”

The next morning, I headed over to Marisa’s church to help her mom and a couple other bridesmaids set-up for her bridal shower!  For her gift, I bought some of her kitchen items off her registry and put them in a basket for her.

I found this big “W” and thought it would be the perfect addition with the netting wrapped around the basket!  Is it weird that I love to create gift baskets so much?

We went with a French theme, which was perfect for Marisa.  For the food, we went with various foods you might find in a little French bistro.

I was really proud of the “coffee station.”  Basically, I came up with some different things that could be stirred into coffee.  I used pirouettes, rock candy, etc. to dress it up a bit.

Here’s the bride-to-be with her future stepson, Coy.  Notice how high Marisa’s hair is on the day of her bridal shower.  Obviously, Marisa agrees with me that you might as well go big or go home.

During Marisa’s shower, all the guests wrote anonymous pieces of advice for her on slips of paper.  Before she opened her gifts, Marisa had to read each piece of advice out loud to the entire room (and there were a lot of people there).  I can’t imagine who would have written this piece of advice, can you?

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

The fact that the handwriting looks suspiciously like mine doesn’t prove anything.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

P.S. — I don’t think it’s too much for me to ask her to have triplets, do you?

P.P.S. — I would settle for twins, but don’t tell her that.

P.P.P.S. — I drew a heart on the exclamation point; doesn’t that deserve triplets?