Spring Has Sprung in VA: Birds and Blooms—and RBF!

Here’s a the current state of affairs at Casa Pearl.

A little bird is building her nest in a fake flowering plant that we have hanging on our little side porch by the patio.  Real bird. Fake plant.  It all seems to be working out beautifully.

Bigfoot is thrilled to see the first real blooms in our perennial garden along the side of the house.  Trust me, he’s thrilled. That’s just his usual expression: RBF (Resting Bigfoot Face).

And the cherry blossoms are in full bloom on my favorite tree out front.  It's just SO lovely.

I love living here.  (We have a white picket fence, no less!  What's not to love?)  Where my husband and I come from in upstate NY, a recent storm dumped 8-12 inches of snow.  I prefer springtime in VA!

There is so much beauty all around us in this world, isn’t there?  The wonder of God’s creation, it takes my breath away sometimes.  (The sun is about to rise as I write this, with the sound of birds singing outside the window; and I imagine them flying in and out of the branches of my favorite tree.)

Little glimpses of what Heaven must be like: I see them all the time.  

Today, VA feels like Heaven.

Bittersweet Musings from VA

Well, it hasn't been a full month yet since I've been here at the blog.  I'm on a roll!

We've been a tad busy since we returned from our summer up north, tending to our Oyster Haven rental house and visiting with my mom and other relatives who still live in the NY town where my husband and I grew up and met in high school.  We've been to some grandkids' soccer games since we got back, helped one of our sons with his basement finishing project, done a bit of babysitting...in a nutshell, we are right back in the swing things.  Such is our life here in VA, and it is a good one.

We stay most of the summer in my husband's childhood home just down the road from Oyster Haven, which he and his seven siblings put into an LLC in 2009 when their mom died (their dad had passed away in 2003).  They all wanted to hang onto it, because not only is it a big, lovely house, but Lake Champlain is right out in the back yard.  The location is almost too good to be true.  And it's such a great meeting place for the far-flung eight siblings.  Well, they used to be far-flung...two of my husband's sisters have houses almost next-door to where they grew up, where they live full-time now; and two other sisters have bought houses in the neighborhood as well, which are mostly vacation homes at present.  But I digress.

Anyway, the idea of keeping a beloved home in the family touches me deeply.  Not one of my husband's siblings can fathom a world wherein someone else owns that house.  (I'm a bit attached to it, too, as I can still remember all the time I spent there as a kid, throughout high school, when I was dating my husband.) It was so worth it to them to keep it in the family that they bought an investment property out in South Bend some years back, to rent out for Notre Dame football weekends, in order to have the extra income needed for the upkeep and taxes at the family homestead in NY. (They recently sold that South Bend property and put all the proceeds into the LLC, and just let me put it this way: that house, which was within walking distance to the football field, was an exceptionally wise investment!)

It's easy to fall in love with a house when it contains so many happy memories and reminds us of the ones we love most every time we walk in the door.  We had such a house in NH, a Colonial beauty where we lived for 26 years and raised our five sons.  Our oldest was only half-way through first grade when we bought it, and our youngest had yet to be born.  It was a "forever home" type of house--not on a lake, but on a quiet cul-de-sac street in a sweet New England town, with deer-filled woods behind it and vast green yards in both front and back.  I loved that house.  We all loved that house.

Okay, looking for the above photo of our NH house (I got out my flash drives to hunt it down!) led me to this oldie-but-goodie, one of the pre-digital age grainy snapshots with which most of my photo albums are filled.  These faces!!  [sob]  If only you could more clearly see how ridiculously cute these boys are.

That picture was taken in the family room just a few years after we moved into that house, on the occasion of son #2's First Holy Communion.  Excuse me...now I need a tissue.  Be right back.

Okay, moving on!

Once our boys all graduated from college and went off into their grown-up lives, we still thought we might hang onto the NH house, that it would be our home base when we weren't traveling to see kids living in different states.  After he got his masters, our second-oldest was living about an hour away, working as a high school math teacher, and he had no plans to relocate; we figured as long as we had even one son close by, we would stay put.  But then he met his future wife at his brother's wedding in 2013 (he was a groomsman; she was a former college classmate and bridesmaid), and before long, he was moving to VA, where his wife grew up.  And where he had two brothers who had also settled in VA, about an hour-and-a-half away from his new home.

So--by 2014, we had three out of five sons living near each other in VA, our oldest married and living out in the Midwest, and our youngest still in college (but planning to go Army active duty and be stationed who-knows-where after graduation), and we had no one (not even any extended family) living in NH.  We were almost always on a plane or on a road trip to visit our boys, and we were hardly ever there.  It didn't seem like the place for us anymore.  Where would we end up?

By happenstance, we stumbled upon our Oyster Haven house when we were up visiting family in NY during the summer of 2015 and saw the "For Sale" sign as we drove by it.  We decided we would buy it and rent it out until my husband retired, and then we'd sell our NH house and that would become our new home base. 

But God had other plans for us... 

Here we are in 2017, after we'd purchased our house in VA--taking a tour of it with two of our boys and their wives, who live about 35-40 minutes away from us and only minutes from each other.  We originally thought we might have to rent this house out until we could sell our beloved NH house; but that same day, we found out that our NH house had sold--without ever having to be listed--for the price we were asking. (Everything was falling into place in the most perfect way!  There's a bit of a long story involved, and I don't want to tell it again; but if you're interested, you can read about it here.)

Anyway, I guess I'm feeling a bit nostalgic today!  The whole reason I started writing this post--before going down a rabbit hole of memories--was to talk about how fast time seems to be flying since we've become Virginians, and how in the seven-and-a-half years we've lived here, so much has changed.  We had seven grandchildren when we moved into our new house; today, we have 22 (with another on the way). I believe our daughter-in-law Braveheart (the one in the brown coat in the above pic) had just recently found out that the baby she was carrying was actually TRIPLETS.  2017 was to be a banner year: we moved, and we also welcomed five new little ones, the triplets plus two others.  It was some year indeed.  And the ones following have been very full of grandchildren and other blessings as well--such as having son #1 move to the area, shortly after we arrived, and live nearby for over four years with his growing family.  (For that stretch, we had four out of five boys here in VA, and all of our grandkids!)  It has been a ride, let me tell you.

Sometimes lately, I find myself having bittersweet feelings; I love seeing our grandchildren grow and mature, yet I want time to slow down a bit!  When we moved here, most of them were available to come to Papa and Grammy's house for frequent playdates and family get-togethers, as they were either homeschooled or too young to be in school yet.  But you know how it is once they reach a certain age; the school year starts, and suddenly there are so many activities: clubs and team sports and weekend birthday parties for classmates and so much more.  It has become challenging trying to get all three families that live nearby to our house at the same time, because they've all got so much going on in their lives.  (Which, don't get me wrong, I know is good!  Believe me, we were there once.) 

So imagine my joy this past Sunday, when all three VA families (three couples and their 14 children) were able to come over for brunch/lunch/early dinner.  I was so excited about it that I spent all day Saturday cooking and baking.

My husband started to warn me that I was going overboard and we were never going to eat it all, but then he said he stopped himself because he could see how happy the process of getting ready for our little party was making me.  (He was right on both counts!  I was happy.  And yes, we didn't eat even half of what I set out; but I filled lots of to-go containers and made everyone take almost all of the leftovers home with them.)

This has gone on too long, I suppose.  So I'll sign off here.  But not before I add a few photos from our sweet Sunday get-together. 

You cannot even imagine how happy it makes me to see these cousins hanging out together at our house!

And to see adorable little peeps like this guy eating at our table.

  

And as always, I love it when our grown-up kids can sometimes take advantage of the opportunity to snag a much-needed cat-nap on our living room couch!

Our VA living room is very small, much smaller than the one in NH.  But it's cozy.

I have a few more things to say about our old house vs. our new one.  But I'm going to save that for another day!  (You're welcome!  Ha ha!)

A “New” Chair for Oyster Haven

Greetings from upstate NY!

After a short stint back home in VA, my husband and I had to make another trip up north to check on our Oyster Haven rental property.  This spring we lost a chunk of our back yard, due to erosion from heavy rains.  We had to have work done to fill it in and shore it up, so that if it happens again we won’t lose our stairs that lead down to the beach.  (They’ve been removed temporarily but will be reinstalled when all is secure.) We waited to get this work started until our busy summer rental season was over.

My husband wanted to see with his own eyes how the construction project on the bank was going; but he had to make a trip back up anyway, because he still had to bring in all the kayaks and the canoe from the lake and get them into winter storage, as well as bring in the buoy and the dock.  Not to mention our pontoon boat, which has to get cleaned up and brought to the marina where it will be housed until next summer.  I was originally going to stay behind, because I’m an incurable homebody and I’ve missed being in my own VA house.  I’ve also missed our kids and grandkids who live nearby.  But the bottom line is that I belong with HIM.  I’m his helpmate first and foremost, and everyone else comes second.  Our boys all have wives now, so they don’t really need their mommy!😊

So another week by the lake it is!  And it’s been absolutely lovely here, weather-wise; it’s so warm and sunny—what we used to call an “Indian Summer.”  Just glorious.  As you can see.

In other Oyster Haven news…

Remember this somewhat recent post about how I re-upholstered my grandmother’s chair?  Well, I have another tale to tell about bringing an old chair back to life, with little more than a scrap of fabric (from where else but my mother-in-law’s attic, which is practically a small JoAnn’s affiliate, no kidding!).  And lots of TLC, of course.

Toward the end of the summer, I was thinking about hitting the secondhand shops or garage sales to look for a chair to put in the upstairs hall at Oyster Haven.  When we bought it in the fall of 2015 and started getting it ready to start renting on VRBO the following summer, we didn't spend a lot of money on furniture, aside from the beds.  We got bedside tables at secondhand stores and accepted a hand-me-down dining room table from my sister-in-law.  We had an awesome tile-topped trestle table that my husband had made for our NH house that didn't really fit in our downsized VA house, and he made a pair of glorious wooden benches to go with it for the kitchen of the rental house.  Some of the dining room chairs, a coffee table and a pair of end tables for the living room, along with a few other random pieces that we didn't have a place for in our VA house anyway, also found a home at Oyster Haven.

We were on a budget in 2015, so I ended up buying an inexpensive, nondescript little padded stool from Home Goods to fill this space in the upstairs hall, and it has been there ever since.

I must have been meant to get a new chair to replace that stool; because one August day my husband and I were driving back to his childhood home, where we stay during the summer, and out by the curb at the entrance to the neighborhood there were two dining room chairs near a pile of trash, obviously being thrown out.  And when we went to look at them more closely, one of them was in great shape, except for the fabric on the seat cushion.  (The other, a matching arm chair, had a hunk of wood broken off of it.)

After it was recovered, and cleaned up a bit, it looked quite lovely.

And I loved how it has transformed that upstairs hall!

(It would have been pretty, no matter the cost; but I especially love it when things are free!)

One quick addendum:I decided to recover the stool and bring it back to use in our VA living room.  It’s a small room, and we have a big family; so any extra seating that we can get—especially seating that takes up very little space—is appreciated.

Have I got enough competing floral patterns in my living room?  (Don't answer that!)

Have a great week!  And happy homemaking!

I Feel Like a Farm Wife (LOL!)

That up there is definitely an LOL kind of statement. 

Because the truth is that we live in a cookie cutter neighborhood (with an HOA) in a small town, on plot of land approximately the size of a postage stamp, and the only garden item we have (other than the glorious perennials that blossom every spring along the side of the house--inherited from the former green-thumbed owners, God bless ‘em!) is a small potted basil plant in the kitchen, which was gifted to me recently by my daughter-in -law Ginger.  We don’t have chickens or goats, or even a dog or a cat or a goldfish. The only “critter” we have on our property is the Bigfoot statue in our perennial garden, a nod to my late dad (because that’s what his grandkids called him, per his request!).

So it’s safe to say that a farmer’s wife I am NOT!

You can definitely see Bigfoot better in the winter!

But my husband and I have recently decided to mill our own flour and bake homemade bread (and other yummy pastry items, too) with it.  So far, I’ve made four loaves of bread and one pan of brownies with our freshly milled flour.  As my two loaves were rising today, I told my husband that this homemaking task makes me feel like a farm wife.  :)  It’s so satisfying!  It means that even if I accomplish nothing else all day, I've made bread!  All by myself!

(BTW, I mentioned our plan to start milling our own flour from wheat berries, at the end of a post here not too long ago, if you missed it and are interested.)

In other news--we also joined a co-op, and yesterday we picked up our first two gallons of raw milk.

What?!

At 65, my hubby and I have decided to eat healthier.  (Or crunchier...potato, po-tah-to.)  Our goal is to try to maintain our health without going on any daily prescription meds.  So far, so good; but at our age, we figured it might be a good idea to really ramp up our efforts so that it can hopefully stay that way.

I mean, I'm not gonna lie: my husband and I both love store-bought white breads and rolls. I sheepishly admit that we both enjoy so many fun, overly processed snack items that can be found at the grocery store. (I know you’re supposed to only shop the outer perimeter of the store and avoid the middle aisles…but the middle ones sure have a lot of hard-to-resist offerings!)  And I definitely like the look of store-bought milk better  than the raw stuff straight from Bessie, which is a little yellower in color.  (I can be squeamish about food that has a different appearance than what I'm used to.) 

HOWEVER, we’re determined to make a change in our diet!  So flour-milling and bread-baking and raw milk-drinking it is! 

Hard white wheat berries, before milling.

And the flour that is produced from those berries in no time flat, 
using this electric mill.

Bread-baking ingredients.  And Mary looking on.  (I just love my
Kitchen Madonna!)

Last Friday, I made my first two loaves, using hot water, oil, honey, lecithin, flour, yeast, and salt.  It was pretty good…maybe a tad dry and crumbly.  But okay.

I baked my favorite brownies as a Sunday treat, using soft white wheat berries to make the flour.  They were dee-licious.

Today, I baked two more loaves of bread, but this time I used butter instead of oil and I added the optional egg to the dough.  Then before I baked the loaves, I brushed the tops of them with an egg wash, which gave them a nice shiny brown crust.

And oh my, these loaves were so much better than my first ones!  I don't know if it had to do with the added egg, or with substituting butter for oil, or if possibly the hot water I used on my first batch wasn't quite hot enough.  But I think we have a winner here!  I like knowing that I can bake an eggless bread, because I have a few grandchildren who are allergic to eggs (and I'm going to experiment more with the eggless recipe to see if I can get it to turn out a little moister and fluffier).  But the loaves I made today--YUM!

To give you an idea of the difference between the first loaves I baked and the ones I made today, in the picture below that's the first try on the right and today's bread on the left.  Quite a difference in appearance, am I right?  I'm almost wondering now if the problem was that I didn't let my first batch rise long enough.  (Hopefully after a bit of experience at this, practice will make perfect and I'll feel confident that I can tell when my rising dough has doubled in size!)  

Did you want to hear about homemade bread today?  Was this post absolutely riveting?  LOL!

I'm just so tickled about all of this, and it makes me kinda wish that we did have enough land to have a chicken coop out back, so we'd have fresh eggs as well, and room to plant a vegetable garden. I think if we had gotten this bee in our bonnet many years ago, my husband and I would have jumped on the homesteading train that seems to be popular with lots of younger folks these days. I'm afraid that ship has sailed, though (or that train has left the station!).  But I do think we're going to enjoy making breads and baked goods with our vitamin- and nutrient-rich home-milled flour.  

I'll try not to write too many bread-themed posts.  But I can't promise that this is the last you'll hear about it!

One last note before I sign off: lest you think I regret that we chose our pleasant little house with no land to speak of, located in a sweet but crowded small town neighborhood, instead of a farmhouse on a couple of acres, where we could grow our own food (and maybe even milk our own cow!), nothing could be further from the truth.  We have already created so many wonderful family memories in this VA house, which is located close to so many of those whom we hold dear to our hearts and is a perfect central meeting place for our VA boys and their families.  When I look out my door, I don't see rows of vegetables reaching toward the sun, or chickens wandering about pecking in the dirt...but I often see sights like this. Grandchildren running up our front walk, excited to come to Papa and Grammy's house.

I might not be a farm wife.  But I'm a very happy Grammy.

Our Walls Do Talk

My husband and I are about to leave our VA home for the summer and head to upstate NY, to the town where we grew up and met.  To the place where our story started 50 years ago. 

I’m excited to escape the extreme VA heat and humidity and spend the summer months on the refreshing lake, boating and swimming (when it finally gets warm enough for this old lady to dip her toes in there!), seeing my mom and lots of siblings on both sides, hosting our kids and grandkids for a vacation week in July at our Oyster Haven rental property.  

But I will miss the kids and grandkids who are our “neighbors” down here (not exactly next-door neighbors, but close enough)—three of our married boys and the 13-soon-to-be-14 children they have between them.  I love having so much of my family within striking distance.  (I want them ALL that close, but I’ll take what I can get!!)

I’ll even miss our sweet little house here, though it doesn’t have a lake view out the back windows—and in fact, it doesn’t even have much of a yard at all around it. We make do, as you can see from these photos taken the other day at a playdate with son #4’s wife and four kiddos.

Most of the walls in my house are gallery walls, eclectic groupings of artwork and memorabilia that “command attention and showcase our fondest family memories” (that’s what the Internet says these sorts of walls are supposed to do, and that description seems to fit!).  My walls look randomly designed (and they are constantly evolving and changing); but they are tied together by the fact that everything I hang up on them has special meaning.  Every piece has a story behind it, and all together, our crowded walls tell the story of our life.

This little section of wall in my kitchen is one of my favorites.

This wall includes canvas photo copies of the pigs I'd painted onto the kitchen walls of our NH house over 30 years ago.  I had to roll a nice neutral gray-colored paint over my precious pigs to make things fresh for the new owners when we moved away in 2017, but I made sure to take pictures before I started that sad task.  And those canvases were among the first items I hung up when we got to our new house.  Notice also the two cartoon drawings son #4 (a very talented artist) did for us as gifts, one of our five boys and the other of my husband and me.  There's the Bigfoot sign I painted for my dad years ago as a Christmas gift ("Bigfoot" was the name his grandkids all called him, per his request!).  That little sign came back to me when he died in 2016.  There's a clock I had made with an image of the cover of Finding Grace (you can do just about anything with photos these days, can't you?). The tiny embroidery piece was handcrafted by one of my twin granddaughters, who is 12 now, as a gift for me a few years ago.  (The little wooden frame?  It originally held a tiny oil painting that I made for my own grandmother many decades ago, a gift that came back to me when she died. Talk about history repeating itself!)  See that small framed print of an old brick building? That's the high school where my husband and I met as freshmen, way back in 1972.  It's since been torn down and I'm so glad to have this image of it!  The small wooden cross with the beautiful scroll work on it was given as a favor at a wedding we attended about a year ago at our parish here in VA.  (We have friends!  We're making connections, when I never thought we would do that after our big move to a new town--and a new state-- at a relatively late stage of life!). And finally, the cutting board is a gift from our youngest son.  It is engraved with our last name and these words: "Together is our favorite place to be."  Truer words were never spoken.  (And my boys are the sweetest, most thoughtful gift-givers.)

Can you see why I love that gallery wall so much?  Since it's in the room where I spend the bulk of my time each day, I look at it often.  It always makes me happy.

I have a passion for collecting transferware and vintage souvenir plates, so many of my walls have plates hanging on them.  But they can't just be pretty; they have to be meaningful to me as well, as these two in the family room most definitely are.  The top one is a souvenir from a Bavarian town where our youngest son lived for three years when he was in the Army.  While he was stationed there, I was able to stay for a prolonged visit with him at his apartment, located right in the center of town, and I fell in love with that area of Germany.  The other plate shows a map of another place near and dear to my heart, of course: the state of NH, where we lived for more than a quarter of a century and did most of the raising of our sons.

On the table: a picture from our trip to Rome in March of 2019, standing 
in front of the Spanish Steps.

The other neat thing on that wall is the framed map of Lake Champlain.  We grew up near that lake and we spend our summers there, so my husband and I love having this reminder hanging on a wall of our VA home.  And of course, there's the requisite nod to Irish culture, the Claddagh wall hanging.

The man of the house has a recliner chair on one side of the room, and this is what the wall next to that chair looks like.  I don't really have to tell you why I love it so much, do I?  I mean, is there anything better than family photos? This wall also has the sweet sign our middle son's wife made for us one Christmas--it might have been the first Christmas we celebrated in VA.  It says, "Papa & Grammy's House, WHERE COUSINS BECOME FRIENDS."  That pretty much sums up why we moved here in the first place and what we hope this house will accomplish!  (Please note the clock, too, a gift I gave my husband: it's an Irish pub clock that says, "DANCING, SINGING, CARRYING ON--CLOSED DURNG MASS."  That was a must-have because we love all things Irish, and that includes Notre Dame football.) 

Over on the other side of the room, where I have a big overstuffed chair and ottoman, this is what my wall looks like. Pictures of our boys, pictures of them with their wives on their wedding days...it doesn't get much better than that.

The best wall of all is in our living room, though: that is where we showcase the ever-expanding gallery of canvas portraits of our beloved grandchildren.  Each little person's adorable mug is added when he or she turns one (a favorite age of ours), so only 19 of the 20 (almost 21!) are up there so far.

We do have some lovely religious artwork in our house as well (a subject for a future post, perhaps?), and a few other pieces of art that speak to me in a special way.  But family photos and memorabilia take up most of the wall space.

I'll be missing these busy but comforting walls, and the tales they tell about our life together, when we're away for the next few months.  But I'm also looking forward to spending most of the summer (when we're not at our Oyster Haven house) surrounded by the walls of my husband's beloved childhood home, where we spent so much of our time when we were young and just starting out.  Those walls do a lot of talking, too, and they've got some great stories to tell.  

We should be packed up and on the road to NY by Sunday or Monday.  But first, some babysitting!  We are going over to the house of son #2 tonight for a sleepover, to be there for their four boys when Mom and Dad leave tomorrow morning to have their new baby.  Our daughter-in-law is scheduled to be induced rather early.  Any prayers you could offer up would be appreciated!  And I'll let you know how it all went, and whether we've got a new granddaughter or a new grandson!

Pillow Talk

Can we talk pillows?  

I love throw pillows.  But they can’t just be pretty or match my room decor; they have to “speak” to me, to give a message with special meaning or have pictures on them that tell a story relating to our family.

These two on the couch in the family room speak for themselves—and for me, too.

This toile beauty with an image of St. Peter’s Basilica is precious for two reasons: it was a lovingly handmade gift from our firstborn’s wife Regina; and it depicts ROME, my husband’s favorite European destination during his years as an international airline pilot, and the city that will always have a special place in my heart, too, after the three trips we took there together before the world shut down in 2020 (one of them a week-long dream vacation, two of them 4-day working trips where he flew there and back and I tagged along). 

These matching pillows on our living room couch, with their vintage Parisian advertisements, are meaningful to me for a number of reasons as well.  My husband flew many trips to France, and the first time I ever flew across the pond to Europe was when I accompanied him on a working trip to Nice in 2011.  Plus, I took francais in high school and in college, so you know, I’m a bit of a Francophile I guess.  (Although I must say that I’d take Italy over France any day of the week and twice on dimanche).

This last one in the living room says it all.  After five years in VA, I rarely think about our old house in NH anymore, the one I left in tears after 26 memory-filled years.

This is where my heart is now.  I miss this place terribly when we’re away. This is HOME.  The pillow doesn't lie.

What about you?  Do you love throw pillows, too?  Talk to me!

P.S. The impetus for this post is that we're in the car today, on our way back to VA.  We'll be there for almost a week, so that we can attend the 5th birthday party of our triplet grandchildren--and also to just check on the house and reconnect with all of our VA peeps.  As wonderful as our lakeside summer in NY has been, I miss my life there very much!  So I am looking forward to a little time at my home sweet home.  

The View from Up Here

We have been in Upstate NY for almost a week.  Ever since we moved from NH to VA in 2017, our routine has been to spend every summer up here in our old hometown, living in my husband's childhood home on the lake and attending Mass at the church where we were married in 1980.  We own a lake house just three or so miles down the road, which is mostly a VRBO rental, and we manage that property (which we named Oyster Haven) during the busy summer season.  (We have cleaners; but we take care of the laundry and making the beds on turnover days.)

I do love it here, even though I dearly miss what we have to leave behind in VA.  We get to visit with extended family (my husband and I both have sisters who still live here, and my 86-year-old mom lives with one of mine); we get to spend lots of time out on our boat; it's like being on a two-month-long date, in a way.

When we're in VA, we divide our time between the families of three of our five sons who live close by.  Their growing tribes keep us very busy. We are so incredibly lucky to have so many of our precious grandchildren (13 of 19) living nearby in the place where we spend most of the year.

I mean, look at this beautiful view!

I miss being in my own house, because I'm a homebody/nester/introvert; but it's really nice being here in NY, too. My husband and I started dating at 15, so in the almost-fifty years since, I've spent a lot of time in this wonderful house.  It’s like a second home.

Still...I miss my cozy cottage in VA, where the grandkids gather so often.

But as much as I miss those VA views, I must admit the the view from up here is not too shabby.

Oyster Haven's back yard.

And next weekend our VA gang plus our youngest son and his wife will be joining us for a Pearl family wedding, followed by almost a week together, staying at our Oyster Haven house (which we've blocked off for our own use).

So life is good, my friends.  I hope you're having an excellent summer so far.

Papa and Grammy’s House...

where cousins become friends.

My husband and I have been in Upstate NY for the past few days, working on our VRBO rental house to get it ready for the busy summer season.  And as beautiful as it is here...I miss that happy house in VA, where our grandkids so often come to gather: where cousins become friends.  Even though our yard there is the size of a postage stamp, and we have no breathtaking views to look at (not counting their precious faces, that is!), I love it so much.

It is a slice of  Heaven up here, though.  No doubt about it.  And I can’t wait for the week in July when our gang will be gathering with us for our annual Pearl family vacation here by the lake.

We head back home to VA today, where most (but not all) of our people are, for a few more weeks, and then we’ll come back to NY for the summer.  

Life is good today.