sugar and spice and everything nice...

Just two days old, little granddaughter Elise Rose...sweetness.


In my book, there's nothing so heartmelting as seeing your husband hold a newborn baby.



And this fine morning, I went on my walk...

And now I am sitting here waiting for little Anne to come over, sitting here with kittens all over me. The one we are keeping, the little orange guy, is purring loudly. The black one is seeking to attack the keyboard, and one is on my feet...they are going bye-bye to new homes soon...tonight the orange guy and our old kitty are going to the vet at the tractor place for shots...and big mama kitty is going in next Friday, she is getting spayed, finally. It's so expensive, the only way you can do it low cost around here is if you get some sort of government assistance. I found one place that would do it, but in a few months, and if we wait that long, we'll have more kittens.

Anne is here now, and the little girls are making breakfast, pancakes and bacon.

I have lots of pictures from Ireland, and I was thinking about long ago, when I was a kid, people would go on vacation then invite friends over for a slide show of vacation pics, which was fun and exciting only to those who actually went on the trip. Those people only existed on television shows to me, we didn't have a slide show projector or screen, and we certainly didn't go on vacations. Our camera when I was little actually used flash-cubes, then the film had to be taken in for development. Cameras improved as the years went by, and when I was ten or eleven, I was so lucky to get a Kodak 110, with an automatic flash! Oh, happy girl I was!

Digital cameras came out, and the little drop box for film development disappeared from Walmart, that drop box which ate so much money during the years that Mariel and Aaron liked to take pictures, before digital.

Now iPhones photos are as good as most reasonably priced cameras, so why tote around both? Unless you are professional photographers, like my nieces, Susan and Janet (two of my sister's girls), who are in Amsterdam right now, shooting a wedding...

Anyway. Phones, cameras, televisions have changed so much, and of course kids these days can't imagine that I actually grew up before the invention of the internet.

With so much technology, it's important to remember the important things in life, like hugging the kids and actually listening to each other. We can have evenings where I look around the room and there are like ten of us here in the living room, all on a device. That's sad. I do nag my kids, make them have times when they put the iPod down, and communicate like real human beings.

Evelyn and I sneaked a trip to the thrift store in yesterday, we had a coupon for $10 off of a $25 purchase. We dug through the sweaters, Ev found one for me that I really like. She found some too, along with a book, a shirt, and some other little things, all for $18 after the coupon.

Yesterday, we went to the library...Anne likes the library. She likes playing with the blocks and the train, and the wood puzzles that make sounds. We got stacks of books. We went to Target, where the backpacks were finally 70% off! I had promised the kids a new one this year, these home schooled kids of mine. They still use them when they spend the night at Margaret's or go to friends' houses, or on road trips. It's part of the fun, when school starts, to get that new stuff, so I wanted to make sure these guys had that fun too, albeit a bit late, ha.

Our van was inspected yesterday, to the tune of $344. It's always something, this time it was the brakes, the front ones were under warranty so we only had to pay for labor, the rear ones...pricey. Paul or Ben or our friend Seth could have done them, but sometimes it's nice to just get them done, and not have to bring it back for a second inspection. We had the tires rotated and the oil changed, and it's all nice and good. We had a new furnace installed this year too, propane. Our old oil unit was falling apart, and Benjamin just happens to be an HVAC (heating/ventilation/air-conditioning) apprentice. So...he installed it for us. How lucky are we that he moved here right when we couldn't get through another winter with that old furnace?

Ah well. I'm staying out of the kitchen while the girls cook because they like to pretend they are working in a restaurant or are on a cooking show, and then they eat it like they are going out to eat. So I stay in a different room if possible, so as not to start in on my little suggestions, ha.

Ha, off on a tangent is my favorite, Margaret and Adrian are moving to a new apartment which they are renovating, so she just texted me asking about painting kitchen cabinets, which I googled, to make sure I shared my vast, yet unused knowledge, of cleaning, priming, and painting cabinets, correctly. The little girls and I really want to tackle some of these projects around here this winter..."no ifs and buts about it", as my mother used to say.