My sister, Christine, lost her fight with breast cancer a few months ago. She was 40.

I want to talk about it, but it’s complicated. Every time I go down one path in my mind, it leads to another. And for a 500 word blog entry, that makes writing about it tricky. So I’ll do this in parts over time. This is the first piece.

My sister deserves a great essay, but I don’t know how to write that. I want to do something nostalgic and hopeful. But I can’t perform under pressure, and it’s easier to be “busy” than have to wrestle this stuff in my mind.

I want to tell the truth, but I know the truth is not what people want. People want the characters in a story to be either Melanie Wilkes or Hitler. Straight forward. Good or bad; definitely not a-little-bit-good and a-little-bit-bad. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if we found out Billy Graham drank himself a toddy after every crusade? We wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Recently, I read a novel, and I vowed it’d be the last in its genre. How do these stories sell? Love is uncomplicated, the boy always gets the girl, and nobody ever cusses the universe when something we love is lost forever. And definitely, nobody ever has sex unless it is a book written by Mark Driscoll.

The truth is that my sister and I were never close when we were growing up. She was older than me by five years, and we hung out in different crowds. She did hard drugs and snuck out of the house, while I found Jesus and congratulated myself for my good thinking.

So when she found Jesus after her diagnosis, I ran into her arms and we cried until dehydration set in.

Actually, that’s not what happened.

The truth is that I didn’t believe her, and I kept my distance like a self-righteous jerk, waiting for this phase of her life to pass.

But it didn’t pass. And the awkward thing was, Well, now what? Are we supposed to act like friends? Are we supposed to ignore the ugly spats we’ve had? And what do we talk about? There’s baggage here, and it’s uncomfortable.

I don’t remember who made the first step. Maybe it was both of us just doing what we could to make things easy on the other person. And that counts for something.

But one day, she called me while I was at a shopping mall. It was bad timing, but she had something to say. I plugged one ear with my finger to block out the noise from nearby tables and sat down.

She told me that God had changed her heart, and that she was sorry for something she’d done to me so many years ago.

I was so sorry too.

And this was the day — the day I sat down at a cheap, plastic table in the middle of a busy food court to answer my cell phone – that I began believing in miracles. I think I believed before, but not in a way that had grit. It was more of a cheap kind of hope, a gamble that’d I believed would work out in the end because the odds were good. But that day, I knew that if God chose not to heal her of cancer, He’d done something so much bigger. It is better to lose your body than to lose your soul. I know that now. I believe it in the dark corners of my mind.

From that day forward, we’d had almost a year to make up for the 35 years that were lost. We visited three times: she came to Kentucky once, and I went to Europe twice, the last time to be there as she passed.

We Skyped for hours. When we ran out of gossip and ideas and Bible verses (we never really agreed on doctrine…), I gave her cooking lessons from my laptop. I would put my computer on the counter, and do a little show for her. I knew she’d never need to know how to make a white sauce, but I didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes I think we try to act normal, as if in doing that, maybe things will really be normal.

My sister loved my blog. (Don’t hold that against her.) I know she wouldn’t mind sharing this letter:

Hey Amy,

I just wanted to tell you again how much I enjoyed your visit. I wish I felt better the last few days you were here but am happy that I felt well for most of the time.

My heart is so elated over our newfound relationship and I find myself regretting all the time lost because of stupid things in the past. I realize that God had to bring us down different roads to finally reconcile us and I am so happy.

I feel like I have made a new best friend in getting to know you better and it brings me tears of joy to say “I love you” to you for the first time after a lifetime of not being able to. As we come from the same stock, it is much easier to express ourselves in writing sometimes than to actually say things in person.

This does not change the intensity of how I feel. I guess the biggest problem with saying things in person is the fact I probably will cry and blubber incoherently rather than get my point across and this could be awkward. I am just tickled pink by getting to really know you as a person and I find that you are really wonderful, fun, sweet, and just lovely. I am surprised and delighted that we have so many things in common and my heart just wants to bless you in every way possible.

Before you left I wanted to pray a blessing over you but the opportunity didn’t come up. I wanted also to tell you how I feel but every time I thought about it it made a lump in my throat instead of words. In my prayer time I pray a blessing for you and your family and I really look forward to spending more time with you.

One day, we will. We’ll definitely find each other again. In the meantime, there is one less person in this world rooting for me, and the afternoons in the kitchen right before dinner are a little more quiet.

Sometimes I think I’m doing this all wrong.

There’s the sock drawer, for instance. Okay, okay. There are FOUR miscellaneous sock drawers in our house, probably more. That’s just what I know about in the laundry room. I’ve never seen the inside of my teenager’s dresser; I pretty sure there’s stale Doritoes under socks that he wore when he was seven.

It’s true. The kids’ socks don’t have matches. If you look on my kindergartener’s feet, you will see that he has on two socks, but I can guarantee you that they are not two socks from the same white tube sock Hanes package. I count on the fact that nobody goes around checking my kids’ ankles. I figure that everyone has their own lives to live. And except for the lady in the produce section at Wal-Mart last week, I’ve been basically right about that.

There are bigger fish to fry. Like the time my fourth grader was learning how to write a step-by-step paragraph. The assignment was to describe her morning. The teacher pointed out that she forgot to include getting dressed. “Oh,” my daughter says, “That’s because we get dressed the night before so we can make it here on time. We all sleep in our school uniforms.”

Yeah.

At least, she is the child who religiously brushes her teeth, so that saved what was left of my reputation. It could’ve been another child (who will not be named) who was assigned to write about his or her grooming habits, and if that happened, I’d be in jail right now for neglect. You have to look on the bright side of things.

There’s also all the stuff I can’t write about on the internet because when it’s all said and done, I don’t want to embarrass myself or my family. (I’m being serious.) I think you should let four years pass first, and then you can talk about it. Yes, I think four is the magic number. That sounds about right to me.

I remember being 18-years-old and walking through a fancy neighborhood. There was this house, and it had climbing roses all over it. There, I thought. Those people are happy. They have to be happy. Who wouldn’t be happy with climbing roses greeting them with a fragrant perfume as the breeze wafts into the breakfast room while bacon sizzles in the backdrop of life?

Fast forward a bunch of years. Greg planted a climbing rose by our breakfast room. (Our breakfast room happens to be the lunch and dinner room, too.) The climbing rose is still alive, but there’s no dreamy smell to the two cream colored roses it coughed up in the last three years. I’m going to Miracle Grow that baby in the spring, and then I’ll sit by the window to wait for that to make me happy.

I have this image in my mind of the way things are supposed to be. That maybe if I got my act together once and for all — maybe if my house was organized enough to find some socks around here (clearly, not a lofty goal) and my garden wasn’t embarrassing — I’d be happy. Maybe if my marriage was sparky and romantic and my friends always remembered to invite me to parties. Maybe if my health was better. Maybe if my kids wrote dazzling thank you notes and were the epitome of gratefulness. Maybe if I didn’t wrestle addictions and lose. Maybe I’d be happy if my sister was still alive.

Maybe.

—–

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weight of Glory, 26)

I didn’t intend to take an internet break this summer, but the power supply on my Mac broke. I’ve been waiting on the cord to make its way over on the slow boat from China and then through the U.S. government mail system. I live only forty minutes from Amazon dot com, but they do not have a drive-thru window.

I imagine in some marriages, one spouse could just borrow the computer of the other spouse, but that is not the way my marriage works. Greg is PC because he is a programmer. I am Mac because I like stuff to actually work when you push a button. We stay in our separate corners. There is a lot of trash talking in our house.

School starts for us in exactly one week, so it’s been a good time to take a break from writing and linking. Whether our kids were in school or we were homeschooling, I’ve always looked forward to the start of the school year. The rhythm suits us. But for the first time, I’m not ready. I don’t want it to happen. I want life to slow down. We have not had a proper summer.

What is a proper summer? Summer is sleeping in, watermelon, and fireflies on the porch. Summer is hooking up the hose on the trampoline and then telling your little boy to “use the bushes” because you don’t want him running through the house dripping wet. Summer is gooey homemade popsicles that somebody named “nobody” knocked over in the freezer. There is no stomach flu in summer…. the season in which God’s common grace smiles on us all.

You know that summer is allowed to be over when you’ve lost too many Uno cards to have a proper game. We’ve lost three quarters of the deck, but I’m not done yet. I want to draw two.

We had our calf last week. I’m not sure what her name is. We’ve called her a lot of things but nothing sticks. She’s a Guernsey x Jersey. Here are some pictures of the birth. They’re graphic.

The birth is beautiful; it’s the flies that are gross. I did not take the time to photo shop out the flies. It’s all I can do to put pictures in a folder and then find them again.

That’s not a calf. That’s a picture of Greg. He’s cringing from embarrassment because I don’t know how to organize things on my desktop. He bought me a Mac so I would stop calling him to fix my computer. (I’m not sure how to take that.)

It sorta worked and sorta didn’t.

He says my computer is “not a real computer” so that’s why he doesn’t know how to help me with all my problems.

I’m stalling so that if you are easily grossed out, you can click away.

Still here?

Here are the pictures….enjoy.

This Sunday I leave for Brussels to visit my sister for two weeks. The reason she does not live in Mississippi or Oklahoma or a little town in the Keys is because she married a French dude and left the states ten years ago. Belgium is far away, but it’s a whole lot better than living in, say, Mississippi. I’ve never been to Mississippi, so I’m extrapolating based on tourism revenue.

Maybe I will walk around a little village in Germany or eat lunch in Paris, too. All I need is a backpack and another destination and I will be free. Maybe I will find myself.

Maybe I should take a map and not get lost. I’m taking a train to my sister’s house, and after that, I’ll eat a lot of food and cuss about my diet. I’ll practice my three French phrases with my four-year-old niece and smile to men on the street named Pierre or Jacques.

My sister Chris is in bed. She’s doing fantastic and she is doing awful. It depends who you ask and what day it is. Her cancer is spread everywhere and the doctors have given up hope. But what do they know? They told her she’d be gone last January, but last week she went to the movies. On morphine, sure, but you’d need morphine too if you had to watch European movies. Bunk the doctors.

You really want her on your prayer team. Now I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in God-as-a-vending-machine. I’m just going to tell you how it happened.

Last week, we needed our cow to calve so we could leave for a family reunion in Tennessee. Small dilemma in the scheme of things (and I mention it at the risk of being punched out by people with real problems), but I prayed. Nothing happened. I asked the kids to pray. Nothing happened. I told my sister about our dilemma on Skype. She agreed to pray. We hung up, and then I walked out to the pasture. The calf’s front legs poked out. And? It was a GIRL.

I’m just saying that’s exactly how it happened. We pray for my sister, but she prays too.

*********

This morning I spent several hours fluffing my porch plants in preparation for my trip. It won’t matter, though. I’m trying to give the flowers support care – a little spraying, a little pruning, a little fertilizer – before I leave. I can pretty much guarantee that even though I leave detailed instructions on their care, they’ll all be dead or on life support when I get back.

Plants are finicky things. They need me. There are nuances you can’t write down for a nine-year-old, but I’ll try:

• Don’t forget they are there.
• Don’t use the “jet spray” setting on the hose unless they are on fire.
• Don’t let the cats sleep on them.

It won’t matter.

I remember the last time I left the house. I went to the hospital to deliver my sixth child. When I got home, the family mistakenly led me up the front walkway where I saw that my beloved impatiens were all dead. Not just wilted or in need of some spritzing, but dead.

I was gone for three days.

This was NOT the walkway to our house in 2008.

The family should’ve charted an obstacle course through the garage, over the stack of jumbled bikes and broken lawnmowers and pool noodles, through the back door. I would’ve broken my leg, but it would’ve been less painful.

I cried. My husband dug in my purse for pills, for the pills that would make the flowers come back and his wife stop crying.  I cried so hard and so long and so bad that all the kids went to bed without being told. My flowers were dead, and I had six kids that needed waffles and milk in the morning now.

My husband had a job and left the state. I had a job, too. It was to get out of bed and walk by the flowerbed every day and stop crying. Greg replanted the walkway in a jiffy (because he is not stupid), but for the next two years, they’d always be dead no matter how hard I tried.

********

Yesterday I watched my son ride his bike through the front pasture. He was chasing a cow. At times like these, I’m not sure why I gave him siblings or a dog. We don’t have sidewalks here or else I’m positive he would’ve chosen to ride on that.

I’m glad he didn’t run over the cow. Puzzle, the nice milk cow, is about the only animal on this place who earns her keep. We get almost three gallons of milk from Puzzle on once-a-day (everyday, of course) milking. Even for greedy guts like us, that’s a lot of milkshakes and alfredo sauce. So last night, I called up the dairy across the street to see if they had any bottle calves for sale. They did.

I hung up the phone and yelled for the masses. My kids found a dog collar and leash (actually, they stole one off the calf born last week) and came back home twenty minutes later with a little Jersey bull calf. He’s one week old. Sure, I can’t get a latte where I live, but I can always scrounge up a bottle calf or a moonshiner lickity split. Bonus points if either can stand up.

While my oldest kid peddled after a cow and my younger son took turns walking the new baby calf on a dog leash, Greg and I sat on the porch, and I talked about the sporty convertible I planned to drive one day. Greg swatted a fly.

The car will have leather seats. When I reach for the seat belt buckle, there won’t be any gum wrappers hidden underneath it. There won’t be dog pee on the front right tire. When I open the car door, a bucket of baseballs won’t spill out and I won’t get a ticket for littering for simply wanting to get into my car on a windy day. The tape deck will work.

By then, my kids will have learned not to eat, drink, throw up, or breathe in the car I have to drive. In this universe, my hair won’t be frizzy anymore, and the bank teller won’t be snotty with me. It’ll all be great. I can see it now.

This morning, I had someone tell me that my life was perfect. I appreciated her letting me know. (She hadn’t heard about the goats yet, and for decorum purposes, I decided against sharing any labor and delivery stories.) I’ve got six kids, a farm, and I make my own butter. So obviously.

I know what it feels like to find out everyone else is having a good time while you’re just paying bills and trying to get the kids to brush their teeth and show some respect around here. I know that everyone else is happy because last year I signed up for Facebook and now I have friends.

We’re all reaching, trying to tweak that thing that if we could “just get right” will magically make our lives perfect, or at least….happy. When it’s late and quiet and dark, sometimes we are just thinking about how to hold our marriage together. I think about the perfect formula for happiness all the time, though I’m too theologically snooty to call it that. If I could just lose weight, if I could just control my temper, if I could just remember what I wore yesterday but forget about that thing someone said last month, if I could just be open and vulnerable to the people I love — then everything would be okay. Wouldn’t it?

For tonight, I sit on my porch and stop talking. I watch. It is summer, God’s favorite season, and incidentally, mine as well. There are cows frolicking in my pasture. And little boys too.

The cats are out of control. There’s like 15 of them, but I don’t even know. Anything more than one cat is too many if you’re more of a dog person. I’m not even a dog person, though. I’m a beta fish lady.

It all started when I rescued four barn kittens when we moved to the farm. They were minutes away from certain death, and I hadn’t done my good deed for the week if the laundry doesn’t count for anything. But this is how it goes. If you do a good deed, you get taken advantage of. It spirals. If you give a mouse a cookie, then they want milk. Good deeds come back to bite you, or in our case, pee all over your petunias.

The kittens grew up and multiplied and now we have too many cats. Cats cost money because they eat cat food and ruin your plants. We live in a rural area where cats are seen as enemy combatants in a video game. If you hit one, you get 10 points, but I think that’s cruel. Spiders and snakes and rats? Yes. But not cats and dogs and hamsters.

I’m a softie so long as you’re not lying to me. Then I get mean. I won’t kill a cat (not on purpose), but I still think there is such thing as too much of a good thing.

I paid the vet to spay three of the original four cats. (The fourth cat was too far along in her pregnancy.) Two hundred bucks later (I bought the pain pills….) and all three of the cats were dead in the next few weeks. One got run over. One got wet and just splayed herself in a funny pose out in the field. And the third one just disappeared one day.

The new mama cat lived and gave birth to more girl cats.

Sometimes the cats hear me talking and decide to get up a catch a mouse. But sometimes they catch other things. Last week there was a dead rabbit on my front porch. There is still a blood stain on the steps even after I told someone/anyone to get that thing out of here. Does that ever happen to you?

My kids love the cats, though. They think they’re great. They want to keep them all. They have hours of fun with dressing them up and dragging them up to the fort.

At the same time, I’ve got boundaries. I’m a no nonsense kind of mother. I’ve got too many kids to let everyone have their whim and fancy. If I let them have their way, we’d have an entire farm full of animals and Coco Puffs for breakfast this morning.

In the spirit of keeping my future adult children out of therapy, though, I’ve tried to say “yes” to them whenever it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Define reasonable.

This week I saw a mama cat nursing 10 kittens. They weren’t all hers. She used to hiss at the ones that weren’t hers, and then after a few weeks, she broke down and just let all 10 them nurse. She was beat.

It’s the way it goes. You have to watch the little rascals and figure out their game. Beat them at it. We’ve got about 25 years on them, and there are advantages: we get to sit up front and choose the music on the radio. We get to make the rules.

Still, kids have a way of running plays around us. As the mother, you hiss at them, but they persist and paw at you. If you give them an inch, then you have 10 kittens sucking the life out of you.

I planned to do a photo essay on getting our bull, Hamburger, to the butcher. However, I’m missing the first pictures of the round up: the lure, the trap, and the manipulation. So, here are some words to start the essay.

The first thing we had to do was catch the bull. He was in a pasture of about 15 acres. After the evening milking of Puzzle-the-nice-cow, sometimes there are three morsels of grain left in the trough of the stall. Usually, Hamburger will go in to see what’s left. So the plan was for someone to lie in wait for him to go into a stall and then shut the door behind him. Easy enough. In the round of Rocket Scientist vs. Dumb Bull, my husband led in scoring.

It is not always that way, however. Farming has been a humbling experience. You go into it thinking, How hard could this be? But it is very, very hard, especially if one of your goals is to not lose all your money. If your second goal is to not look and sound stupid, then that is difficult too.

We’ve approached these new situations with a willingness to learn and listen to those with experience. That’s served us well, but there are still many mistakes to be made, even after you have all the information you could possibly have before you start.

We’ve had crazy success with our chickens, which I never mentioned because I didn’t want to have pride come right before my destruction. But the law of sowing and reaping has an asterisk and it came anyway. We got goats and it was a disaster. We’ve done alright with cattle, though.

After my husband and son trapped him, the bull jumped a six foot wall. He pawed the ground and smoke came out of his nose. (I’m not sure about his ears.) There were some good pictures to be had in that situation. Now all we have are some busted boards for nothing.

My boys — can I call Greg “my boy” if he is acting like a cowboy? Yes, I think so. — claimed that loading up the bull was pretty easy. I imagine the two of them just put on orange vests and directed the man-eating bull onto the ramp by waving plastic light sabers in the direction they needed him to go.

Or maybe they roped him, and as the bull bucked, my teenage son entered his manhood with nary a cuss word. For about a half hour, they were Marlboro men with rough hands and dirty jeans. Neither boy had a desk job or time sheets or clean fingernails. It was just them and nature.

When they read this, I’m pretty sure my son will ask, “What? Doesn’t mucking stalls, mowing fields, and planting your stupid orchard count as nature work?”

Now, now. We don’t say “stupid”. [....does anyone find preschoolers easier to manipulate than teenagers?] And we don’t say “Shut up.” Or “Can I have five bucks?” Or “Lady Gaga”.

No, I just mean that rounding up a bull sounds more farm-ish and exciting than, say, cutting hay. We are getting ready to castrate a six month old bull soon (it’s a long story on why it wasn’t done earlier), so that will count for rodeo points too.

I’m pretty sure Greg will notice how I said “we” are getting ready to castrate a bull. He loves how I say “we” all the time when I really mean that “he” will do something and I will watch and give commentary.

So the reason there are no pictures of the round up? I was sleeping. I had the covers pulled up high while my boys were outside working in the predawn hours.

If you would like to call me lazy or hypocritical, I wouldn’t fight you on that at all.

Here is Hamburger leaving our farm. It’s now safe to go in the pasture again.

All the girls posed around the trailer, acting like we had anything to do with anything.

Then we drove to the butcher.

Several weeks ago, some of our friends offered to bring over the chains so we could do the dirty deed ourselves. But we declined because we’re very busy doing other things. (Me? I’m sleeping. But Greg is busy and that counts.)

Below is a picture of where Hamburger would commence his death march. There are no pictures of actual marching because they opened the trailer gate and I was on the wrong side and nobody wanted to redo it for the camera.

This is the poor guy before us.

I’m pretty sure all our kids know where food comes from. Now if they could just learn that money doesn’t grow on trees.

Sometimes I look at these kids and think, “Oh my stinking heck. I’m responsible for them. Am I ruining them? Am I doing this right? What if they all need therapy?”

Notice Charles is not in the picture. I’m not responsible for Charles. He’s wild. He’s crazy. He’s full of fire. He’ll either be on death row or invent the cure for cancer. I’m not sure.

Charles had the quote of the day: “Dad? I don’t want that to happen to me.”

This is gold. Pure gold. I don’t think you should manipulate children…. except in very special cases. Charles is very special.

Since Hamburger was a bull and not a steer, they’re hanging him for a couple weeks to age him. That’s the advice we got, and so that’s what we did.

This is a bonus tidbit: Before we left, Charles had to use the bathroom. I was fine with a tree, but the owner insisted that he use the one around the corner and DOWN THE STAIRS in the dungeon. (If it was a Friday the 13th, I would’ve told my kid to pee his pants.) We passed the revolver on the table. We passed the headless cow hanging up. And when we passed the trash can of cow brains, I cursed motherhood and potty breaks.

Then we went home and had pasta for dinner.

Life continues to be exciting down here on the farm. Here’s a typical day: wake up, water all the animals, check the heifer, water the animals, check the heifer, water the animals, check the heifer, and then go to bed.

There might be some cooking, cleaning, and minding of six children who have too much free time on their hands, but basically, that’s a typical day.

Izzy, our Guernsey heifer – who is for sale, ahem — is due to calve this Wednesday. That means it could be any day now. I first confirmed her pregnancy last week when a neighbor told me, “Your Guernsey looks like she’s about to spring.” That’s when I remembered that we AI’d her nine months ago, and by golly, it worked.

Up until this point, I just assumed it didn’t work because nothing ever works out the way it’s supposed to. But it did, and we’re on high alert for our first big birth on the farm. (I’m excluding the small births: several batches of kittens, the aborted calf that Greg ran over with the tractor last week and then we dissected, and some beef calves in a far pasture that didn’t technically belong to us. And besides, those calves were born in winter, and I’m not going outside to see babies in the winter if it doesn’t come with a million dollars.)

We moved Izzy to her own pasture, away from the rest of the herd. This pasture has its own barn, as well. It seems that this diva treatment was not lost on her, and she has gotten a little uppity with the move. How else can I explain that a normally nice cow smacked me with her head and pinned me against the barn wall causing me to slightly pee my pants?

Pregnant women are like that. They do stuff. Cows like routine and some pampering, and that’s true with expectant women as well. Give them their ice chips and don’t rock the boat.

Once, I saw a pregnant woman deck a labor and delivery nurse. It was vicious. Poor nurse. But my excuse is that she touched me without asking, and I was in the middle of giving birth.

Sometimes when asked about the farm, I say, “Nothing’s going on,” but that’s a lie: something’s always dying, about to die, got out of the fence, or in the case of our goose who wouldn’t stop messing on the driveway, got shot and fed to the pig. It’s all very exciting if you’re into that sort of thing.

Last week, we had to separate our bull (think: teenage boy) from a cow in heat (you get the picture). Here were our assets:

1. Greg, driving a truck with broken springs
2. An Amish neighbor with a twig
3. A random piano repairman who happened by for an impromptu visit and should’ve been more scared than he was

They got the job done.

Later this week, we have to load the bull into a trailer to take him to the butcher. I imagine we’ll have ourselves a little rodeo. Remember, I have problems with fear (plus, I’m not entirely stupid), so I’ll watch from the porch since someone has to mind the children and the stove.

So, I’ve been making trips out to the barn to make friends with Izzy. In just a few days, someone around here is going to have to actually get underneath a thousand pounds of attitude and touch her udder, so I figure it’s best to reason with her. Make friends. Talk. Shoot the breeze. Then you can go in for the uncomfortable places.

I’ve used Shutterfly in the past, and I like their photo books. Proof: I’ve even bought one without a coupon. So I was happy when they sent me several hundred dollars in free loot to give to y’all during their Mother’s Day promotion. Unfortunately, I totally bombed on posting that. What can I say? I get behind on email, and plus, I’m a terrible blogger.

So, I was happy the Shutterfly folks didn’t cuss my sorry self off when I apologized for not following through. Instead, they want to send you some Father’s Day cards.

I’ve got a free photobook (you make it) and 50 cards (5×7, flat or folded) to give away this Friday. I’ll split the prize. Just leave a comment saying which one you want. Or if it doesn’t matter, choose either.

Yes, it’s definitely not as lucrative a prize as Mother’s Day, but if you’ve noticed the ads and displays in stores right now, Father’s Day is always like that, isn’t it? ;) Thanks Shutterfly!