It' s a little after 9 am on the first day of 2007 here in Seychelles, and I've just watched the ball drop in Times Square. Anderson Cooper was doing his usual over-animated, cute-little-news-guy-taking-himself-WAY-too-seriously thing on CNN, and the crowd was going wild.

Playing "Imagine" just before the last minute of the year EST primed my pump for an emotional reaction to the whole hullabaloo and had me wondering what our world might be like if John Lennon hadn't been killed. That spun off into a series of 'what ifs' that amounted to nothing but a shoulder shrug. It is what it is, this world of ours.

Thankfully ... oh so very, very thankfully ... 2006 was a fairly uneventful year. All those I love plugged along without great drama or trauma: kids grew, bills got paid, haircuts happened, minor illnesses were put up with and recovered from. Could anyone ask for more?

No.

New Year's Eve ...

We had friends over for lunch ... a couple who this time last year were longing with all their hearts for a child. Now, they have a darling little boy, almost one-year-old, from Cambodia. It was lovely to see the happiness in their family, and to watch Sam, Cj and Yves playing and laughing ... these three kids who came to us so miraculously.

We talked a lot about the events that led us from where we began to the moment we sat down at the table, happy kid noises all around us while messy dribbles of lunch ran down chubby chins. We thought of birth parents and thanked them with all our hearts. We toasted Cambodia … her history, great and tragic, her strengths and weaknesses, her beauty and her hideous side. We spoke of the future, long and short, and started making plans for our get-together in April for Khmer New Year.

We took loads of photos. We laughed and adored and encouraged, hoping for those little performances we love to share.

I was in bed last night by 9:30 and quite happy to sleep my way through the turn of the clock, the flip of the calendar page.

At ten minutes to twelve, the phone rang. I barely heard it, but Mark answered and I drifted back into oblivion. Five minutes before midnight he woke me with the news that Rannick had died.

Continued ...