After 6 months, I feel like posting. Wish I knew how to include pictures, but not of me.

Profound thoughts along with some that aren't: We have four children, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, so we certainly qualify as experts at parenting, right? Does the sun rise in the west? Nevertheless, we do feel blessed with our brood - which includes our children's spouses and some grandchildren's spouses and a fiance and Significant Others - for which (as I've said many times) we take no credit or blame. I'd like to mention that, by the time our kids had kids, our kids began to admire us rather more, as in "How did you ever manage - make that survive - raising 4 kids who came in a five-year period?" I'm not going to divulge the answer to that - and don't anyone dare to think we put schnapps in their milk.

We had the good fortune to spend time over the holidays to have visits from a good percentage of our family, so that almost all have seen our new home (not Caleb [Kiara's fiance], Travis [Anna's S.O.], or Amiee [Derek's S.O.]). We don't have quite the accommodations we had at our old place; e. g., Burn and Mark slept in the bed in Bob's room, while Kiara and Stefan slept on the floor in there, one on each side. After they left, some Burks came: Elissa slept in the bed in my room, putting Ansel on the floor in the adjoining closet, while Barbi and Anna slept toe-to-toe on the sectional in the bedroom. . Tom took the sectional in the livingroom. Bren and Mark utilized the lodgings at Brad and D.A.'s house. The Burk's visit got extended by one day because of bad weather, so we appreciated that.

Still waiting for the profound thoughts? Me too. But here's one with some outrage: our old house has been on the market for about six months, and there's been nary a nibble, which is bad enough financially (think two heating bills and real estate taxes for starters), but this has been during the snowiest December, nay, the snowiest MONTH in recorded history, so - even though this place has snow-removal service - Bob has had to do some shoveling here in addition to trying to remove the snow at the other place, which is a corner house. The snowblower has been on the fritz for most of the time, despite having been serviced. The Crowning Touch is that, due to the position of each of these homes, we get the most snow in our yards of almost anyone else in the Moorhead-Fargo metropolitan area.

Maybe my next blog will be profound. This one was just long, and you're welcome.