I think I need a personal secretary to keep up the blog. Do I have any takers? Aw, c'mon! I’ll dictate and you can write. I can be pretty good at dictating things! Seriously, it is so very kind of you to check back regularly when I’m not doing a very good job of keeping the blog up-to-date. Much has happened since the last posting, though since I’m getting so old now, I doubt I’ll be able to remember it all! I’m telling ya, life is going to be much easier for me in about two months when I have much less to deal with! Yeah, yeah, yeah…we’ll see how much better I am at updating this thing when June rolls around.
Just for the record (and those of you who live around here know this), the snow day on the previous post was not February 2. That just happened to be the day I posted those pictures. The real snow drizzle day was January 20. I thought I was going to get some fabulous snow pictures when a practical blizzard was forecasted for March 2, but alas, we saw nothing but a wasted day out of school. Now we have to go on Memorial Day. Ugh!
If you read the last post on the previous blog shortly after I posted it, you read that Mike was being posthumously awarded the South Carolina Athletic Administrators Association Athletic Director of the Year award for 2008-2009. (Try saying that ten times fast!) A day or so after I posted it, I received an official letter about the award and it read that newspapers would be notified after the awards breakfast on March 19. After receiving that, I thought maybe I shouldn’t say anything about it until afterwards. You know, since all the major media outlets read my blogs and all, we didn’t want word getting out too soon. I attended the breakfast and accepted the award on Mike’s behalf. I had never been to that awards breakfast before (though I went to that conference with Mike when I was pregnant with Ava) and nobody told me I was supposed to prepare some sort of mini acceptance speech. The ever-wonderful Vince Lowry, AD at Blythewood High whom Mike loved dearly, had wonderful things to say about Mike to the crowd as he introduced me to accept the award. I’m telling you, that man is just a natural speaker. He didn’t know he was going to have to say anything until that morning, and you would have thought he had made all sorts of preparations. He reminded me a lot of Mike in that aspect—Mike never prepared speeches, he just spoke off the cuff. Anyhow, I accepted the award and said a couple of things without looking like a complete idiot (or at least no one told me if I did). The gist of what I said is that Mike never cared if people liked him; he was more concerned about people respecting him. People generally either loved him or hated him—not many sat on the fence, and he knew that. The thing is, even the people who hated him still respected him. I have an extremely nice plaque to share with the girls as they get older to show that their father was respected professionally.
The girls and I went to the zoo on Sunday. I was off from work on Friday and wanted to go then, but the weather was too nasty, so we went to Edventure instead. (Big mistake—way too many people there for my blood. Apparently, it’s the hot spot on rainy days.) But back to the zoo story…I had been wanting to go for a while because a friend, Nicole Walker, and her husband had a brick made (for lack of a better word) that is now forever in the pathway in the zoo. The brick reads, “‘Mike’s Girls—Best in the World’ Mike Starnes” because he used to always tell the girls, “Daddy’s girl…best in the world.” I forgot to take the paper with me that told me the exact location of the brick, so the girls and I had to do a little searching. Hey, it’s the zoo…there’s supposed to be adventure, right? We finally found it. The brick will definitely make all of our future trips to the zoo special. We had a big time during our visit. Savannah was asleep during the first leg, so she missed the flamingos. After Ava had a whiff of them, she was ready to move on because they were “too stinky!” It was on to the monkeys and lions. Ava then rode the carousel all by herself (‘cause she’s big enough, you know) and Savannah woke up just when we found the playground. Ava was most excited when she saw a little train, so we had to ride. You would think one would get more than two laps around the course at two bucks a pop, but such is not the case. Just consider yourself warned if your kids try to coax you into riding. All in all it was a fun time. A little windy, but fun nonetheless.
Little Miss Savannah is just a growin’ and a developin’ right along. She jibber jabbers up a storm and actually talks pretty well in English too! As I’ve said before, Ava didn’t speak ten words when she was two. Savannah is 18 months and miles beyond that—often talking in two and three word sentences. “I get it,” “Brush teeth,” “I happy,” “Where are you?” and everyone’s favorite, “I pooped!” I must say that is awfully convenient when children can communicate in words and you can figure out what in the heck they want! Now if we could keep her from being so darn rotten! She just cries her head off if she thinks my mother or I have left her alone with someone else. That is definitely one area where Ava had an edge on her. Ava never minded me leaving. She practically would say, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Okay, so she didn’t talk, but I could tell that’s what she meant. I’m smart like that. Ava has been a great big sister. She initially only referred to Savannah as “Nanna” or “Baby Nanna” (when I was pregnant, she couldn’t pronounced Savannah’s name, so she would say Nanna), but lately Ava has been calling her “my baby.” She’ll say things like, “I love my baby,” and “My baby is so sweet and cuddly.” They get along very well and love on each other quite a bit, though Savannah has taken a liking lately to bopping Ava in the head every now and then. Sometimes it's even unprovoked.
Can you believe that Ava is going to be four at the end of April? Next thing I know, she’s going to be packing her bags and heading off to college! She’s exited about turning four now. She wasn’t too keen on the idea over the last couple of months—she wanted to stay three! I told her she was just going to have to get used to that sentiment! She certainly doesn’t need any more “stuff”—she’s got a gracious plenty, but if you would like to do something for her birthday, I have a little idea, though she won’t be able to appreciate it until she’s much older. One of my goals as the girls get older is for them to really know who their father was, what kind of person he was. What I would love to do is put together a collection of stories by all of you who knew him, so both of the girls can read them one day and have a better sense of their father. So, if you have a favorite experience or two with Mike (and I know there are quite a few stories out there that involve Mike Starnes!), I would love for you to write it down and send it to me. You can either put it in the snail mail or e-mail me at
dmlstarnes@yahoo.com. If you have one of my other e-mail addresses (I have three), you can send it to one of those as well.
Okay, since I still don’t have that secretary just yet, I’m going to cut it short here. The zoo pics along with a few others are below. Check out the aprons on the girls…my mother and sister Janet made those for them for Christmas. Ava’s culinary skills are about equivalent to her mother’s—she’s making a cupcake. I tried to coax her into making a bunch of regular ones, but she wanted to use that darn cupcake maker she got for Christmas. Santa should have known it wasn’t as simple to operate as those commercials made it seem! The messy one of Savannah is from her diving into her Valentine treat. Thanks again for keeping up with us and for your many, many prayers!
I’m going to have to apologize for there being no pictures. I actually wrote this post on Monday night and delayed putting it up because I have been trying to get a slide show of pictures together, but it just ain’t working. I’m not sure what the problem is—I just had my computer “fixed” a few weeks ago, and everything is supposed to be okay. I’ll keep working on it, but I’m not sure how long it will take me. So, if you want to see pics of the girls, just keep checking back. This has been the third night in a row I’ve tried but have had no luck. Sorry!!!
Finally, the pictures! My apologies for taking so long to get them up. My computer completely crashed, so that was the cause for the delay.
