Weekend of granddaughters

What a great weekend...got to see all my precious granddaughters! Aunt Donna and I went to Tuscaloosa on Saturday to "handle" the older girls while their mom and dad went to some fake football game...guess it is a temporary fix for football addicts (A-Day, I think it is called.) The poor babies were sick but they were still breathing when we turned them back over to the parental units, thank goodness!

The girls didn't want anything to eat when we took them out to eat but Ellie kept eating popsicles so I guess we didn't starve her!

Poor Sophia

Don't know how sick Ellie was but she was certainly ready and willing to ride that "sick wagon" with her sister!

Ellie without her popsicles!!

Sunday, in the middle of a tornado, Donna and I braved the elements to go down to see John, Christy and Isabella. It was certainly worth the trip!

Isabella has learned to crawl and is getting pretty close to that dreaded walking stage...first time parents always seem so eager to get that baby mobile...not so much with the next ones, I think!

Isabella trying to crawl over John's shoulder while he was showing us the Isabella movie he has made.

Anniversary celebration

For some crazy reason, Martin and I decided to get married around Christmas. It was a wonderful idea to get married (just celebrated 17 happy years) but as I remember, a really bad time of year to try to pull a wedding together! I am usually SO good about getting all the Christmas shopping done really early and thanks to the Internet, am able to still to do just that...but what I didn't count on back in 1991, was all the crazy last minute shoppers trying to do their thing while I only wanted to get ready for a wedding!! They just would not accomodate my obvious priority and treated me as one of THEM, a late Christmas shopper!!! We survived.

We went to Gatlinburg for our belated honeymoon back in the good old days...3 kids at home to get through Christmas with and have continued to celebrate our anniversary late each year. This year we once again went to G'burg and stayed at a cabin that we had rented 2 years ago. What a great find! The cabin is beautiful and the view is magnificient. Nice to get away after all the insanity of an open house and Christmas.

When we checked in it was starting to snow!!! YES! I had been diligently checking the forecast and had 2-3 chances of SNOW (for those of you that live in B'ham, the white stuff that really does fall from the sky, but only in other places). We drove up to the cabin, started unpacking and, honestly, a BLIZZARD started!!!!!!!!! I thought, oh YES!! It is going to work!!!


Fast forward...THAT was our snow...all 10 minutes of it..you can see in the above picture.

Ok, in the mountains, forecast still for winter storm warning the next day until noon. I was still feeling very hopeful...


Never happened. I think I am personally responsible for scaring off snow....no other logical explaination.

We did have beautiful cold weather and here are some of the pictures from our snowless trip!











Above is the view from the deck of our cabin.


So is this one...

Thought this was pretty cool...clouds sitting low on the mountains across from our cabin.



Thanks, Martin, for a wonderful trip and a great 17 years!

Url's house

These are the after shots.

I'm mainly posting these pictures so my sister can see all the major improvements that have been done to our dad's house. This was a really hard thing for me to manage since it sort of brought his death into focus. At the time of his death in 2005, I was numb as well as terribly worried about my sister, who was in a post-surgical coma in Tennessee as well as the fact that my older son, John, was about to be deployed to Afghanistan. Donna, these pictures are for you to peruse and don't let me know if you don't like anything!!!

But...

on a more happy note...these are the reasons life is so good now!

New Year's Day

John, Isabella, and Christy

John, Isabella, Aunt Becca, and Martin

Marga, Isabella, and John

December stuff

Christmas 2008 was both wonderful and quite stressful! As if Christmas isn't stressful enough, we had an open house a couple of weeks before Christmas that included about 80 of our friends and neighbors! It was a lot of fun but not something that I even want to think about any time soon! Many, many thanks to one of my wonderful daughters-in-law, Candace, without whom I would not have been able to pull it off! (You're wonderful, kiddo!!)

We had all of our family with us for Christmas and were very blessed to have everyone safe and healthy (at least at the time)...the poor Zacs are making up for it post-Christmas by everyone getting sick.

Zac and Candace cooked the Christmas turkey (unbelievable) and a fantastic wild rice dressing!! WOW! It just doesn't get any better than that...unless someone broke in and cleaned up afterwards!!