49 Years in the post.

 Weather seems to be having a small effect. On Tuesday the North East had 2cm of snow, a pitiful amount that brought traffic to a standstill and had me driving 3 hours to get to the AEON, 2 hours of that on the A1 doing 1/2 a mile an hour.
Then on Thursday the snow decided to trick me as we had chilly rain all the way apart from the one section of the road that sits at 2000ft up which decided to have 8 inches of snow in just one single 2 mile section.....on a slight incline. Believe me, a Ford Focus without socks gets a bit slippy slidy in fresh snow, and didn't it just have to be on the bit with the highest drop over the edge. It's all exciting stuff, but I had to get to Garrigill as there was a long weekend arranged for Kasha's birthday. I arrived back to see her fretting over a painting while I fretted over the lack of snow socks for the car, this snow sock thing may be a recurring blog entry until I get some. Xmas is coming, perhaps I will get socks in my stocking?
On that thought, I learned the lesson a while ago that women don't think like men at Xmas.
Men, and by that I mean proper men tend to be functional and we don't mind getting presents that we need in order to do a thing. Screwdriver sets, saws, things for bending pipes...all of these things are good as Xmas presents. However..... a woman may go on for ages about a slow cooker or special pans or other functional stuff and other such things not kitchen related, but if you buy one as a present you end up wearing it. It's a concept that for men is hard to understand and often painful to learn.

Which moves un on quite nicely to the birthday girl. There was a promise of breakfast in bed, but in the end it was decided to have breakfast downstairs while watching the rain through the AEON window. Then on to the opening of the cards.

The highlight of the morning came when on just the right day (birthday) the postman dropped a big package through the door that had come from America.
There was much excitement as the packet was poked and prodded, shook, sniffed by the dogs and then exitedly torn open.

There has never been a brother at birthday time before and so this was and exciting moment.

The top was off, the nose was poked in and what emereged was one of the lovliest birthday thoughts I have ever come across.
If you don't know the story read the blogs earlier in the month, but to summarise Kasha knew she had kin through her fathers side but never knew who or where and we found her brother a few weeks ago. For the first time in her life she has family beyond her mum. 

And then she had birthday cards.
One for every year of her life that she and Karl had missed.
49 hand written birthday cards, each with a special message relating to what was happening in the year it should have been sent.
There were smiles and tears, and weepy warm bits at some of the messages. There were 49 years of laughter and joy and sadness and sharing, it was lovely.
Of course now Karl can say that he never ever missed a single one of his sisters birthdays and Kasha has a set of cards to remind her of that, and they will be treasured forever. There is already a search for a special box to put them in.

I like happy endings