Stella crawled into bed with us at 6.30am.  Clare followed at 7.00am, and quickly remembered that today was Father’s Day.  Both girls gave their dad the biggest hug ever, then found the gift that Clare had bought at school and the present and card that she’d made at Brownies.  She’d written beautiful words in it and drawn a picture of her father – without his beard, strangely enough!  Once they’d had pancakes and maple syrup for brekky, both girls had a bath to remove the sticky drips then headed into the backyard to romp and play.  Neither of them wanted their fun interrupted by coming to church with me.  So I headed off on my own.

I thought that I’d better turn my fancy new smartphone off during the service, so I pressed some buttons and popped it into my bag. A couple of times I thought that I could feel a vibration somewhere, but dismissed it because I knew that my phone was off. When the service was over and I turned my phone back on, there were three messages on it, all from my husband.

Message number one – frantic – “I can’t find Stella. Please come home.”
Message number two – still frantic – “I can’t find Stella, I’ve rung the police, please get home as soon as you can”.
Message number three – calmer – “it’s okay, I’ve found her, she was hiding in the linen cupboard for over 20 minutes and wasn’t answering when she was called. The police have gone”.

I checked the phone again; it hadn’t been turned off after all, but had been on vibrate mode rather than ringtone mode.  Those vibrations I thought I’d imagined were actually calls from my frantic husband.

Happy father’s day!

(the first two photos were taken at Werribee Park Mansion a few weeks ago)