I'm Ba-aaccck...

So, it's been three months since my last confessions of a gramma. It has been a glorious and very busy summer. I think I'm finally caught up though! Yay!

Most of you know that three of our four kids and their families have had major changes in their lives through this past year. Dillon and Val came to stay with us for a month while Dillon worked with a doctor here. Valerie and I had some good visits and my love and appreciation continues to grow for her. Dillon was able to spend a lot of time with his dad--something that I they will both cherish for years to come.

Brandi came to spend time with us off and on from March through September. Paul was in training and thought he would be back in August but they kept him until the middle of September--letting him come back just a few days AFTER Brandi and Zachary got kicked out of their apartment. Luckily she has some mighty nice parents who were able to drop everything to go save her in her time of desperate need. We packed her up and moved all of her stuff out here. That way we were sure to get a little more time with her and her little family. Now she is getting settled in her new home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, while Paul begins his new career in the Air Force.

Josh and Mindy had a lot of exciting changes in their family. Josh graduated in April and Mindy in July. They were blessed with a beautiful little boy the first part of August and named him Logan Chase (Josh's middle name is Chase!). I'm not sure that it was very fair that Mindy had him a week early though...I never had a baby early! We made a mad dash up as soon as Josh called with the news and got to stay a couple days to help out and ooh and aaah over the new little addition to the family.

As if having a baby and graduating from college weren't enough, Josh and Mindy had to add to the excitement by getting a job offer in Virginia! It is quite the story of how it all happened. One minute Josh was a little disappointed with the lack of response to his resume and then within fifteen minutes he had a really good job on the line. They first made contact late on a Thursday night and by Monday he was in Virginia checking out the company--receiving an offer that he couldn't turn down. And, of course, as luck would have it...the following few days he received quite a few other serious job offers--one of which was from Google. They had less than three weeks to get things packed up and moved out to their new home. We were able to make one more trip up to see them before they took our new little baby off to the far reaches of the continent. We spent a weekend helping them pack (while I battled the flu) and get their stuff off to be shipped. Josh is in heaven with his job and I think Mindy is in heaven being back in the city and close to her family.

I'd have to say that the greatest part of my summer was playing with the grandkids and visiting with the grown kids. Oh, how I love all the kids in our lives. We have a truck load of topsoil piled in the front corner of our yard. It's been there since last summer when I was doing a lot of landscaping in the yard. I thought I'd finish it off this year but I hardly made a dent in it. One day Sydney discovered it. It became our "beach" and we would go there often so she and Zachary could play in the dirt with trucks and shovels. Sydney would get a little freaked when she discovered a bug here and there but after realizing she was bigger than they were, she calmed down quite a bit--until she found more bugs in the house or elsewhere. It was only the beach bugs that she conquered totally. HA!

Brandi and Zachary were able to stay for a week after Dillon and Val got here so there was a little bit of cousin time for Sydney and Zack. We were quite surprised one day when we walked out the back door. Our "beach" had really earned it's name that day. Next to us is a field that gets watered with irrigation pipes and the end cap of the pipe had come off making the water gush over into our yard. The kids were totally delighted with the river that ran through it... They spent hours out there playing together. It was a memory maker for me--I hope it was for them.

The first thing that we did after all the dust was settled and all the kids were moved was to promptly get sick. I had a cold and flu but Duane was down for six days with a really, really bad flu--we are assuming it was the dreaded H1N1 flu because he had all the symptoms. I may have had a milder case of it but I was never as sick as he was. I told him it was because I ate dark chocolate on a regular basis.

Now, with all the kids gone, the house is quite empty. I had become accustomed to having people around. Although I hear that I'm a very busy person, I did stop and smell the roses while they were here. I'm leaning toward the Amish way of thinking where the families are closer together; where every Sunday or so they get together for dinner and they go camping and doing fun stuff together. This long distance grand parenting thing just isn't as fun as the hands on stuff.