Recently, the girls had an opportunity to attend a friend's birthday party at the Charleston Museum. Penny went with them and Logan and I went around the corner to the Children's Museum were we also have a membership (go Groupon!). He and I don't get to spend one-on-one time as often as we'd like and we had a great time. Nowhere to be. Nothing else to do. No one else to pay attention to. We just did whatever Logan wanted to do. No limitations in the craft room. No rushing through the little grocery store. Played pirates to our hearts' content. It was a great day!

[nggallery id=1]

Penny and I were, on a rare occasion, casually strolling by ourselves through a department store looking for a few things for our girls to wear. I passed by a rack of clothing in the shorts department, and then another... and I noticed an alarming trend. Because I have no sense of how kids' clothing sizes work (and don't even get me started on kids' shoe sizes) I asked Penny, "How old are the girls that buy and wear these shorts?" She looks at a couple of tags and told me with a serious face, "Well, the shorts on these racks are sized to fit girls between 7 and 16 years old."

I dropped my jaw and found myself just...... angry. 

But I didn't know, at the time, with whom I should be angry.

• The fashion designers?
• The clothing manufacturers?
• The retail stores?
• The parents who buy these shorts for their kids?
• The teachers and mentors who allow such shorts to be worn...anywhere?
• The kids who want to wear such clothing and promote the look as popular?

You know, I'm 47 years old. And I realize just by virtue of the fact that I use the word "hip" when I tell you that I am not "hip" anymore, that I am indeed not at all "hip"...anymore. Or cool. Or the bomb (?), etc. I realize that I am becoming my father and he told me and my brother and sisters that we would understand one day, when we had children of our own, why he wouldn't let us bring to fruition many of the hair-brained, stupid ideas that we constantly conjured up in our little heads. Those days are here now and I am discovering more fully every day that my dad was a genius!

So who's to blame? Who deserves the weight of my anger and frustration and disbelief? A short, true story may illustrate...

When I was in college, I worked for a little copy shop downtown and one day we got an order to design and print some small table tents for a local restaurant for that evening's special on "Crab Cakes." (By the way, I know it seems very convenient for the purposes of my story, but it's a true story, so I must confess that I was out of town when this series of events occurred and only got the story when I returned.)

The rush order was taken at the front desk from the restaurant representative. As far as we know the order was taken correctly at that time. The order went to the desktop publishing department where it was typeset in all caps and set 2 to a page. The job was then photocopied onto neon yellow card stock, trimmed down and folded into table tents. The delivery person picked up the order and delivered it to restaurant about 6 blocks away. A waiter received the finished table tents and immediately distributed them around all the tables in the restaurant. Within minutes it had to be a customer of this popular dining establishment to point out what a half-dozen people had missed – that all the bright neon yellow table tents happily informed shocked customers that the special fare of the evening was indeed "CRAP CAKES!"  Let's just say that it all rolled downhill from there...

I do remember the next staff meeting was not pretty, but it pointed out the answer to my earlier questions – EVERYONE is to blame. Because at any point in the process, someone had an opportunity to stop the horrible wrong that was being carried along by blind or uncaring worker bees.

And so it is for this fashion monstrosity.  I'm interested in opinions and solutions that others might have on the topic. For me and my house? Well, we certainly won't be buying any shorts like this for our eight- and ten-year-old girls, so... voting with our dollars and all that. I will be going to department store managers to start a dialogue on what they think about their own children wearing these type of clothes. I'm still working on the rest of The Plan...

The Bible calls us to modesty in I Timothy 2:9 – "I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety,..." I know this makes me sound like one of the "black and white guys" in the movie Pleasantville with their seemingly unreasonable set of rules, but we have to protect our children from being seen as sex objects. I affects their view of us as parents, of themselves in their own eyes and the eyes of others. How can we change a culture to have them respect their bodies?

I had to work late one night recently, so Penny and the kids took the opportunity to have dinner her mom and grandmother in Bonneau. I am the sole seafood fan in the house, so I thought I'd make a new shrimp dish I've had rolling around in my head for the past couple of weeks. I have been changing my eating habits to be healthier and I've lost about 12 pounds so far, but more importantly, I feel so much better! So this dish is a result of my changed thinking.

PREPPING: I purchased some wild-caught shrimp from our local Publix market, along with some shredded parmesan cheese. When I got home I diced a small zucchini  and a small yellow squash. I also diced a third of a large bell pepper and a third of a large sweet red pepper (they were on sale...). Then I chopped half a stick of celery and a half dozen baby sweet carrots. Lastly, I cut about 10 cherry tomatoes in half.

COOKING:  This part is all about timing...You don't want to over cook anything or it will get mushy. With a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a tiny pat of butter in a medium hot frying pan, I sauteed the peeled shrimp, which I had cut in half to be more bite-sized. Add a liberal amount of Mrs. Dash Table Blend and a smaller amount of ground red cayenne pepper. Cooked just until the pink was starting to appear – 2 or 3 minutes. Then I added the squash, peppers, celery, carrots, more Mrs. Dash and fresh-ground pepper and stir fried for about 2 minutes. Then I added the tomatoes last. Stir fried for another 2-3 minutes and added some shredded parmesan cheese. Stirred a couple of times, removed from the burner and put a glass lid on the pan to keep hot.

I confess that in this one instance, I had forgotten to cook my brown and wild rice, which would have taken about 20 minutes or more. So, it was Uncle Ben's 90-second brown and rice medley to the rescue! It has a bit more sodium than the one I usually cook, but it tastes great.

EATING: I had cut back my soda consumption to once a week, so I took the opportunity to drink a hot (spicy) Ginger Ale with the meal and it was perfect.

VARIATIONS:  There are lots of variations you can apply to this general recipe:  use chicken (cook a little longer initially), change up the veggies, add the cooked rice in the middle and stir fry, try your own favorite spices, serve over angel hair pasta, add a little white sauce... feel free to get creative and enjoy!

Sabotaged by a 4-year old. I doesn't make me feel any less outsmarted to think of him as "almost five." Here's his latest...

I got Penny a card for Valentine's Day and wrote a nice, long heart-felt love note to her inside. We're not huge Valentine's Day folks, but this year, I thought I'd take it up a notch...you know, from nothing. I was so pleased with my note and placed it at the perfect angle next to her toothbrush in the bathroom, where she was sure to see it when she awoke.

However, I went to bed late and the girls got up early to make Mommy breakfast, so Penny got up before I did. More importantly, Logan got up before I did. Big mistake. Penny comes in and gently asked if I had gotten her a card with a yellow envelope. I smiled and said I had and asked if she liked it. She smiled right back and said that she did – when she finally found the card underneath the kitchen table and the envelope next to the bathtub on the floor!

Logan! Seriously, dude? He said that he liked the card too and thought it was for him. Anyway, good laughs for the day...until our next holiday. What is that, St. Patrick's Day?

I remember my friend Paul's words making their initial impact and they have stuck with me daily for the past 7 years. I had accepted the opportunity to visit a remote village in Borneo in the summer of 2004 and had observed poverty, squalor – and yet, happiness – like I've never seen before. His words that struck me were simple and honest: "Yeah, this is how most of the world lives."

I was reminded of this again after reading Paul's post entitled, "I Can Make You Happy... Right Now." Of course, I jumped at even the thought of him actually coming through with his offer – and now, having read the surprisingly brief  article, I am positive that he does. Read it by clicking the title and let me know if you agree.

It also reminded me of a phrase I have heard in various places, by various people in various situations and income levels, or lack thereof.

"What I wouldn't give for..."

...and then fill in the blank with whatever it is we think will make us happy. I know from experience that going down that road in my head and my reality hardly ever leads to where I thought it would, and usually in the other direction.

Lord, make me a grateful person for your presence in my life and for the people, places and provision you have placed in my life. Let us all be able to say wholeheartedly, "I am truly blessed!"

We are starting our annual vegetable garden project on time, for a change, this year. We planted some of our seedlings today and will plant the rest in 2 weeks. We'll probably plant the ones we started today around Dad's birthday, March 20th and then the rest around Good Friday. The kids are really able to help a lot these days and are very hands-on. We'll post progress photos as soon as they start sprouting. Our goal is to NOT mix up the labels this year...we've found that it's very hard to tell a cherry tomato seedling from a Better Boy tomato seedling, ditto for yellow and zucchini squash.

Here's our tentative lineup for this year:

• Better Boy Hybrid Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Straight Neck Yellow Squash
• Zucchini Squash
• Kentucky Wonder Green Beans
• Silver Queen Sweet Corn
• California Hybrid Bell Peppers

We may tweak the mix a little as we go along, but this is the initial plan. This is our first year trying corn, but we're going to give it a whirl. We have to plant it in a square pattern instead of long rows to help with pollination. We may replace the green beans with something else – they "run" all over the place and take up a lot of space, but we may run them along the back fence or something this year.

Dad, we miss you so much and think of you every day. I don't know where a year has gone, or how we have made it without you, but we are healing, growing and remembering - day by day. We love you.

Randolph Hall is one of the original buildings at the school and is a center point of the campus. The raised part of brickwork behind the lamp posts is called The Cistern. It's the cistern which, in ages past, was not filled with dirt, but water – for watering horses belonging to locals and travelers. Every Mother's Day, the college builds a simple stage over the top of The Cistern and holds commencement ceremonies for graduating students. On either side of the center brick walk are expansive and lush lawns for relaxing, playing and studying...usually in that order. The massive oak trees were beaten, but not entirely broken by Hurricane Huge in 1989. They stand as a testament to the resilience of a city and a school. Lots of great memories in this place!

I made this photo of Randolph Hall to frame with my diploma. I liked the way the flag looked in this one...