Gentle Years

We sent our I-800A application in on November 2 and got the receipt about 10 days later, even with Veteran's Day in between.  So now we wait for a fingerprint appointment.

Halloween was a good time, but I gave my camera to Pretty Baby to take pictures of all three boys, since Brody was not coming to town and both she and Golden Baby were taking their boys to see G's parents at the same time.  So by the time I got the camera back, Aidan had had enough of his Ninja costume (he looked great!) and I only got shots of him eating candy.

The little ones were adorable.  Ricky was a skeleton-he wanted to be a ghost but no ghost costumes were available in his size so a skeleton was his second choice.  Brody was a cowboy, and what a little swashbuckler he was!  And Matthew was a fisherman; this is the costume that Ricky wore in 2008 but because of our delay in Beijing (paperwork issue) I missed both seeing him that year and seeing Matthew born.  This makes up for it!

And now we have a new arrival!  Our first granddaughter was born this week.  At first they thought she was 17-1/2" long (short) but on second measure, stretching her out, she was found to be 19-1/2" long.  Brody was pretty scared of her at first but he is already catching on to the big brother thing.

Our daughter in-law with the baby earlier today

Golden Baby and Brody with the baby on the night she was born

Pretty Baby with her niece on the night she was born.  The baby has Pretty Baby's middle name and Matthew has her uncle's name as his middle name, so the "mutual admiration society", as I call the relationship between our first two kids, continues.

Excited little cousin-he's not the baby of the family any more.  In fact, he just turned two last month and he's potty trained.  Takes after his mother that way!

Yesterday I went and got my oldest sister from the nursing home she is currently in and then picked her husband up at their house so that they could come see my mother.  My sister and her husband live about 75 or 80 miles north of us.  So it was a long trip up, back, then up and back again, complicated by her walker and his wheelchair, but definitely worth it.  On the first leg of the journey, I was missing my sister Kathy terribly (1948-2004) and wishing that she was with me.  Pretty teary stuff-I found my sister on her floor as she lay dying-I miss her all the time.  Anyway, I looked up and through the rain in the Notch was the biggest rainbow I've ever seen in my life, arcing over the Notch and touching all the mountains.  It was gorgeous.  I think that Kathy sent it down, to help both on yesterday's journey and on the long journey that my mother is approaching.  Here is a picture of the drive that I made, but without the cloud cover, rain, and rainbow.