Birth Announcement!

Make sure you note the change for Leif Erickson day! (look to the left, look to the left)

Elisabeth has a blog of her own

Paddle In The Pond.

She is my gentle girl with a fairly soft spirit, she may cry over the suffering of something but can off another just as easy. (She is by no means perfect, unless you get and can up hold the whole passive aggressive thing.) Elisabeth (ee-leese-a-bet), my one try at an unconventional name. Lets just call her Bet.

So, if you will allow me, I'm going to brag about her for a minute or two and I sure hope that no one feels ill will toward me or my intentions for bragging about one of my girls. If the other ones would bring me gifts of chocolate or other delights, I will brag about them. (Coffee doesn't count that just keeps your mother out of the local papers and off the AP wire.)


When Bet was little she liked to have funerals. She had a black dress-up dress that she would put on when she needed to hold a funeral. The key however was that it needed to be raining. So if some animal happened to pass away here at the farm on a sunny day it would get buried but the funeral would have to wait until it rained. Fortunately, because we live in the PNW, nothing had to wait long for its proper send off.

She soon learned that she could hold better services if she chose wisely those she invited to attend. Often she couldn't trust any one's seriousness (no one else kept black clothes around for occasions such as this) so she was frequently seen by herself.

If it was a particularly good day for mourning and no one had popped off recently, she would just have a funeral remix. It was one such day that her father spotted her on the other side of the pond walking solemnly under her umbrella.

"Hey, olden days girl!" he called out. Of course had he looked close enough he would have realized that this was not a olden days scenario but a funeral remix opportunity.

Not a word was spoken from the far side of the pond but the umbrella slipped from her shoulder so as to block the view of the house and her father. He received the message loud and clear.

That adorable imaginative girl has most certainly turned out to be a terrific young woman. One among four that I'd be happy to hang out with for the rest of my days and watch old movies with especially John Wayne ones and some new movies like Open Range and throw rotten tomatoes at nonsense like Napoleon Dynamite and She's the Man, but like any other good mother, I am schizophrenic and watch the latter with other daughters. (I am on the search for a movie that will make EBet cry, so far I have been unsuccessful. Blossoms in the Dust didn't even do it nor did How Green is My Valley. Sensitive but not emotional?)

She quietly absorbs all that goes on around her and unlike her mother doesn't necessarily find the need to speak out about everything that comes across her plate and smells foul. But when she does it is usually priceless.

I think you may find her blog delightful. I hope that she soon gets into the swing of things and posts often.

I would love to continue to tell you how imaginative, talented, and faithful she is but I will let you discover all that yourself as you get to know her better from her blog, Paddle In The Pond.