This is an afghan that I made for our little granddaughter that we are looking forward to meeting in March of 2009. Joel and Lisa will be having a little girl! It's always so exciting to know that a new baby is coming.














In April Andy and Liz are expecting a baby too. They will find out before too long if it will be a girl or a boy. Then I will get started on an afghan for that little person. I love being a grandma!

Dick can go to sleep at the drop of................

Whatever he has in his hand!

He was just resting his eyes.

Halloween Then and Now

Then.......
On a Halloween many years ago, this was Andy dressed up as a very scary skeleton. I wish I had written the date on the picture. Maybe he remembers, but I think it was about 1985.


Now..........

Andy's sweet little girl was a chicken, and a very cute one.
That's her pretty mom in the background.


Here are a few more pictures from this Halloween.
My kids will be surprised to see I dressed up for Halloween!

Joel's friend Mike & his family came over. We were so
happy to get to see their sweet little Chicken Baby.

Baby D & Baby I enjoyed seeing each other in their costumes.

This is really too stupid to post, but I will probably never dress up again so here it is.

This big boy got quite a stash.

Tortilla Power

Anyone who has struggled with migraine headaches will find this interesting.

Two weeks ago on Sunday, I cooked an easy crockpot dish that is a mixture of chicken, beans and corn that we like to serve on tortillas. This time we used corn tortillas, and we enjoyed a relaxed Sunday dinner. Since I am used to cooking for a family, we had plenty of leftovers, and on Monday we had the same evening meal. Tuesday evening we had the same meal AGAIN, and nobody seemed to mind.

Next I need to give you a little background information: It is an uncommon event for me to wake up feeling good. I almost always wake up early with a migraine headache, and I do whatever I can to get myself going and get on with the day. I often have to take Imitrex which is a medicine that usually gets rid of my headache, but it also makes me feel tired and weak.

Now to the interesting part: On Monday morning I woke up feeling great. I was just grateful, because it doesn't happen very often. I was headache free all day long. On Tuesday morning I woke up feeling great. I told Dick that I couldn't remember the last time I had felt so good two days in a row. On Wednesday, I felt good again!

Now my brain had to go to work. If there was a reason for this, I wanted--no needed--to figure it out. Usually when I try to figure it out, I think about anything I might have done that could have contributed to the situation. Things like not enough sleep, stress, eating chocolate, eating cheese, and the list goes on and on. But I've never been able to find anything that has really helped.

As I thought back over the previous days, I realized that I had eaten the same evening meal each day. The element that was a little unusual for me was the corn tortillas. It was crazy, but worth trying, so Wednesday night for an evening snack I cooked three corn tortillas. What do you know! I felt good on Thursday too. Then Thursday night, I had to test the theory, and I skipped the corn tortillas. Friday morning at about 5:00 AM I awoke with a miserable migraine. It took me a good part of the day to recover.

To make a long story not too much longer, I have experimented with a few things to figure out just why this works, but every morning after I have had the corn tortillas, I have been free of the miserable migraine.

I still want to find out if the tortillas really need to be cooked in oil or not. (I did discover that the oil without the tortilla does not work.) If an oil-less tortilla works, then the next step would be to try a serving of corn.

Whatever the reason, I'm just grateful. Waking up and feeling good and being able to do the things I want and need to do is a blessing I've been enjoying for almost two weeks. I pray (really) that it continues.

The 40th anniversary of our wedding was in June. We went on a camping trip to McCall because it holds many special memories for us. We met there when we were very young and enjoyed many great vacations with our families and friends.

Our children gave us a very special anniversary gift. Many of them were here to visit and surprised us with a video collection I'll include here.

The first one is a series of wedding photos. The second one is photos of us when we were younger along with some notes from family for our anniversary.





The next one is a slide show of our children growing up and of our sweet little grandchildren. It was a special surprise when we realized that Emily had sung & Joel had played piano for the recording. It's a song Dick loves, and he said many times that he would love to hear them perform it together. So they decided to surprise us and record the song. They did a beautiful job.



The fourth one is a special message from Daphne, our first grandbaby who lives in Virginia.



The next one includes pictures from our camping trip to McCall. We really enjoyed being together in this beautiful place. The days just went too fast!



It was an anniversary we won't forget. We love our family!