As you are reading this, I'm heading south.

It's Spring Break in our neck of the woods (even though Spring itself has yet to arrive!), and Emily and I are flying to Florida for a week with my sister Maria and her family.

While we've had this trip in the back of our minds for awhile, it all hinged on baby Abram (funny how a baby that hadn't even been born yet ruled our lives!).  This Gramaw was no way leaving until she had held that sweet new grandbaby in her arms!  Abram loved Gramaw and Aunt Emmy so much that he came a few days early...so we had time to make trip plans after all.

So...I'll be taking this week off from blogging to enjoy a short vacay with my peeps!  Not to worry, my camera is taking the trip with me so I'll have plenty to share with you when I get home next week.

Adios, amigos!  I'm...

...Florida-bound!!! 

My dear cousin Lydia reminded me that tomorrow, March 30, would have been our Grandma Britt's 99th birthday.

That's our grandma, the little 4-year-old barefoot darling in front (who looks SO MUCH like Mama and my sister Maria) with her parents and siblings.  Grandma always hated it that she didn't have shoes on in this photo, but apparently she had a sore foot that day and it hurt too bad to put on shoes.

Beautiful little Harper, 10 days old.

You don't have to be all grown-up to dream of being on the beach.

I couldn't help but shed a few tears yesterday morning at 3:00 am, as my son Kyler's voice broke in joy as he excitedly exclaimed over the phone, "It's a boy!  We have a perfect baby boy!"

Not that they would have been disappointed even one little tiny bit if it had been a girl...Kyler was just so overwhelmed with relief and happiness that their precious little one had finally arrived.  In this day and age it's a little unusual for the parents not to find out their baby's gender beforehand, so we were all eagerly awaiting the birth and the extra bonus surprise of whether we were getting a boy or a girl.

Welcome to the family, Abram Kenneth Gray, born at 2:36 am. on Tuesday, March 25.

7 lbs. 9 oz. and 20.25" of absolute newborn perfection!!!

originally posted March 6, 2013

It's syrup season in Indiana!  I don't want to lose this post when I shut down my old blog in the near future, so I'm re-posting this from my visit to my cousins' Stockberger Sweetfarm last March.

I wasn't prepared for the wave of nostalgia that washed over me as I pulled into the driveway.

I'd been here many, many times in years long gone by...it was all so very familiar but suddenly so new as well, like I'd stepped back in time to my childhood when Daddy would take us with him to the sugarhouse.

If this photo looks vaguely familiar, it's because I posted some similar ones of Krew last week. 

This morning I discovered 20 more photos from the same photo shoot...my camera has two memory cards and they were on the other card!  So of course, I had to share a couple of my favorites as well as share with you a new venture I'm trying out.

Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2013 was "selfie"...

..."a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or a webcam and uploaded to a social media site."

I guess, technically, this is not a selfie since, even though I could have, I did not actually push the button myself.  But it was taken by Krew's Grandma Dorothy on her smartphone and right now I am uploading it to a social media site (I'm counting my blog as such...it is social and uses media on a website...it counts in my book, at least for the purposes of this post!).

Since little Krew was born six weeks ago, in the middle of one of our many snowstorms this winter, I've been wanting to do this photo shoot.

Some might even say obsessing....

I was shocked when Mama called to tell me that Dad needed surgery to remove cataracts in both of his eyes.

Just this winter, I was visiting with him sitting in his recliner as he suddenly stopped talking and looked past me out the window, through tree branches and across snowy fields, then wondered aloud why that red semi was going so slow in the westbound lane of highway 38 a half a mile away.

I couldn't believe there was anything wrong with his eyesight.  My 82-year-old father could see better than me!