Not really news.

I am a sucker for unshed tears.

"Do you know what Clay said to me on the day we had to say goodbye?" he asked me, apropos of nothing, on Sunday morning.

No, I had to admit that I did not. (But I would have bet that it included the word "awesome," because the two of them had adopted that word as the essence of big-kidness and used it amusingly out of context all the time.)

"He said I would be his best friend forever."

And that's where I died a little, because he got choked up like an adult who's trying not to cry, and Those Eyes got all glisteny and wet and he turned his face away so I wouldn't see the tears in case his ducts couldn't reabsorb them before they fell.

Not to mention the fact that it reminded me of Tod and Copper from The Fox and the Hound, which was a movie that utterly destroyed me when I was little and I still can't think about without feeling achy in the heart.

Tod - er, I mean Clay - is coming over Saturday.

Good idea or opening an old wound? I really don't know, but for at least two hours they can be "awesomest buddies" again and do all those 5-year-old boy things that they've been doing with new friends instead of each other ever since school sent them down separate paths. I would accuse myself of attaching a sentimentality to it that's beyond their years, but then again ... teary eyes.

Miss Katherine is a chubby angel, still scheming every day to derail my efforts to get anything at all done but doing so in such a charming way that I have to succumb.

Plus she just won't abide all eyes not being on her at all times, a little conceit born of having the two men in her life fawning all over her every second, and who could blame her?

She's growing so fast, all I can think is how I should be memorizing all of it: The deer-in-headlights stare, the unruly hands that occasionally act of their own accord and smack her in her own face, the wispy trying-to-be-hair coming in on top of the soft, mostly bare scalp. Squishable thighs, kissable cheeks, bobbly head when she's tired.

There. I think I got it.

And if memory fails me, there's always the 1,027 pictures on my iPhone.