From Courtney's Closet #56 - Courtney's Playdate!

Hello and welcome to another edition of From Courtney's Closet! This week it's playdate time!! And guess what? Today a little *boy* has come over to play! And boy oh boy is he a CUTIE!! He is my friend Sue's sweet grandson Cole - if you follow Sue's blog (which I'm sure you do!), you know full well what a proud Gwamma she is! As soon as I started posting these playdates she emailed right away - "can grandbabies play too??". Well of course they can! :-) Cole and my Carter have a lot in common - they both love trucks! So Sue chose this adorable photo of Cole in his truck jammies to inspire us. I decided to dig out my Dress Up Billy from Pink Cat Studio and put him in his firefighter outfit. And I love the colors in Cole's jammies - light blue and red always look so great together, and I really love the added touch of gray. I have to say, even though it's simple this card took me much longer to create than expected - I get so rusty when I take time off from stamping! (and yes that is why I'm posting this on Friday instead of Thursday - thanks Sue for your patience with me!!)

I absolutely adore the card Sue created! Her coloring is perfect, and the card is put together so well, all of the touches are wonderful! And best of all - I love the added "gwamma" to her watermark! :-) Thanks so much for playing Sue, and for sharing this photo of your sweet grandson with us! If you'd like to play along too, please leave a comment back here we can see what you did. :-)

On a side note - not sure you care to read this part - it's completely a coincidence that we're posting these sweet fireman cards on September 11 - this post was supposed to happen yesterday. But as I was thinking about our cards it hit me how fitting this is. I'm sure like all of you, I will never forget that horrible morning eight years ago today. I've never documented my experience, so I thought I'd do it here. It was long before I had kids, and I was working as an engineer at Motorola. I was running late for work that morning and had Good Morning America on. I remember they came in with breaking news, that there had been some sort of "explosion" in one of the towers. They were showing a live picture of the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. I remember Diane Sawyer gasping. I didn't fully understand at that point what I was watching, but I knew it was something horrible and immediately started crying. I paged my boss and told him I'd be working from home that morning, I couldn't leave the TV. Then there was the Pentagon. Then the plane in Pennsylvania. It was like the entire world was turning upside down. I began to panic - my husband was actually in the air as all of this was happening. He was not anywhere near these places - but everything was just so bewildering at that point, I didn't know what was going to happen next. I had to join a conference call for work - my boss was trying to focus on work, but the engineers we were talking with in Israel kept asking me to keep them updated about what was on the TV - both towers fell while we were on that call - somehow the widgets we were working on just didn't matter at that moment. The experience made me so angry with my boss - I could not understand how he could be so heartless. Later I understood - not everyone deals with trauma, shock and grief the same way. When Joel finally landed in Nashville he of course had no idea what was going on. The landing had been delayed, the pilot gave some vague explanation about congestion in the airport. Joel thought it was odd that he couldn't get his phone to work, not realizing all lines were jammed at that point. He saw people huddled around TV monitors but continued to the rental car line, where he found probably a hundred people waiting. Finally he realized something was not right. He literally got the *last* available car in Nashville that morning, and when he got in contact with his boss, he told him to start driving home because the site he was to visit was in lockdown (they had nuclear facilities there) and he would not be getting a flight out anytime soon. I remember being completely numb for days and days. I'm a news junkie anyway, and I watched *way* too much news then. I don't think seeing it replayed over and over was good for anyone. It was interesting to me that at some point all of the news stations seemed to have decided that they wouldn't show the actual clip of the second plane hitting anymore. This morning I saw it again for the first time in years, they were replaying the live coverage from that horrible morning on MSNBC. It was shocking and emotional all over again. I don't think it's possible for me to ever forget the details of that morning and the days that followed, but I feel better having them documented here. Such a sad day.