Big Announcement!

I'm soooo excited!
We got the best news this weekend, and you can probably guess what it is from the picture.
We are going to be grand parents! Our daughter Laura and her husband Aaron are expecting a baby in October. Somehow they kept it a secret for 12 weeks!
They were able to hear the heartbeat on Friday.
They spent the weekend letting family and friends know the news and gave me the okay to share it now.
It's probably good that I didn't know earlier, because I would have had a hard time keeping it in!

Family times

We so enjoyed having Andy home for a few weeks over Christmas. He will be deploying to Afghanistan in February so we won't have a stretch of time with him for a while. He may be home to leave his Jeep here along with his belongings while he's gone, but if that happens it will be a very short time.
So - we tried to take in all the family time we could.
Here are a few pictures from our house during these 2 weeks.

Oliver loved crawling under the tree.

The night we opened our gifts, Oliver was in his glory. There was wrapping to play with and bags and boxes to craw into!

It's fun to watch Andy playing with Oliver. Andy hides around the corner and Oliver tried to sneak up on him. Soon there is a cat zooming around the house and Andy laughing his head off!

There was a lot of this going on too. We got the new Donkey Kong for our Wii and Bob and Andy had lots of fun trying to defeat it!


I try to get a picture of all the kids in front of the tree every year. This year Laura protested, saying she looked horrible because she had been sick, but they agreed, after I threw out the fact that I couldn't get one next year because of Andy being gone.
Anyway - I was blessed to have them all with me. That's the best gift for any Mom!

Crash!

Our son-in-law, Aaron is a mechanic. He was at work Thursday morning, when there was an accident in his shop.
One of the other guys heard tires squealing, went to the door to look and was nearly struck by a delivery truck that came through the door. Another guy yelled which alerted Aaron to move, as the truck barreled through their shop and out through a wall!
The truck stopped outside at a fence, but the tires were still spinning. The man driving was having a seizure, which they later found was caused by low blood sugar.
He had a broken rib, but was otherwise uninjured.
No one in the shop was hurt, which was astounding, considering that 5 vehicles were hit, one was nearly knocked off a hoist, big tool boxes were thrown around and parts were knocked off the wall and tossed about.
We are so thankful for God's protection over all of them!
Here's a few pictures to show you the damage.

Here is the truck, after going in one door, through the building and out through a wall.

Here you can see the hole the truck made as it went through the wall. Aaron was standing at the edge of that hole, talking on the phone to a customer. The call was disconnected and the customer called to see if everything was ok, after hearing lots of crashing and people saying to "call 911."

This Honda was shoved under the other car which was on the hoist.

Here is another shot of that car. It also shows some of the stuff on the floor. The wall the truck went through is where there where bins of parts, so you can imagine the mess when they all came down.

Here's one of the tool boxes that was knocked down.

This is sad. There was six cars damaged (including one in the parking lot)and one of them was this 1955 Ford Fairlane. It had been completely restored and was just about back together. Of course the people in the shop are more important, but it's not something that is easily replaced.
This is a reminder of how quickly things can happen, and how we need to thank God every day for the ways we are protected that we may not even know about.