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"The perfect day."  That's what Rebecca called today....and it's only 2 o'clock in the afternoon ;-) My over-arching goal for my adult life is to have a house with a pool.  I didn't need it any earlier than now, because I wanted it for one reason:  the grandkids. Literally, my happiest memories of being a child are wrapped up in my grandparents and spending my summers in Florida.  Sometimes people talk about the horrendous childhood I had, but I wouldn't give up a moment if it means giving up that time with G-Mother and G-Dad.  They were part of the package that came along with Chuck, as did my religion, so it's all working out in the end. My grandparents lived in Tallahassee, and when I spent my first summer with them in 1976 (at the age of six), they were living in Woodcrest Apartments while their home was being built.  It was in that apartment complex pool that I first learned to swim.  Every summer after that (for ten straight years as they a...

Hi Glo, I have been feeling like I really need to express my thankfulness to Heavenly Father not just in prayers but as a journal/blog entry.   Since 2020 has started our lives have really turned around.  I have to say how grateful I am to Heavenly Father for how things have turned out and one way to do that is to write out how I see the blessings he has given me. So, last year in the fall when I lost my hearing, I was really worried about some very specific things:  would I be able to find a job, would I be able to find a good job, would I be able to pay our bills, would we be able to find a house and mortgage due to the troubles we had selling our old house in Pennsylvania for a big loss, would we be able to pay off the bills we were accruing when I was not getting paid as of September 3, 2019 and when I started a new job.   At the time I had 6 things in the works: I had applied and interviewed and been offered jobs with Geisinger, Pittsburgh and B...

There are few things that I will always remember during this very strange time with COVID-19:  moving into our new house and feeling the weight of that blessing, John working again, having Ethan and Rebecca and the babies here with us for over a month, having Hannah home, and losing weight . Yep, I'm not sure how it started, but one night several of us were sitting in the family room talking, and we just decided that we would join Weight Watchers. I think John might have received an email promotion (buy 6 months, get 3 free), so we joined before the promotion was gone, but we decided to start the following Monday. There is power in numbers.   From the beginning, I've had either Hannah or Ethan and Rebecca home with me, and we have been killing  it, learning about the plan and making it work. Hannah and I originally set a goal to lose seven pounds each before she left in a month.  We lost the seven pounds in the first two weeks.  Next, we set a goal to lose 2...

This.  This right here.  John was blessing the sacrament for us today, and this happened yet again. This picture just mirrors what happened several weeks ago: In fact, Rebecca found BABY preparing and blessing her own sacrament the other day.  And there are so many other pictures like this: It is incredible for me to watch how much our examples are literally watched and mirrored by the babies.  How thankful I am that our babies are surrounded by such good people!

With coronavirus, we knew there would be no graduation ceremonies for Markie-Boy.  There are some ceremonies that I don't value as much as others, but graduation from an MBA program?  There needed to be more than Mark just starting work on Monday, so he came home for the weekend.  In true Kennedy fashion, everything was basically about him.  He got to choose the movie we watched, the food we ate, everything.  But on Sunday, I wanted to have an actual ceremony for him. While I was teaching my Relief Society lesson over Zoom, Ethan made carrot cake cupcakes for Mark, carrot cake being his absolute favorite flavor of cake.  I then came out and made a big pan of King Ranch chicken along with white rice, corn and biscuits.  We donned anything orange that we had (Illini colors) which basically boiled down to any Tigers swag we own.  During lunch, Ethan asked Mark a bunch of questions about the past two years, and it was a nice trip down memory lane. ...

Ethan and Rebecca brought the babies to stay with us for a couple of weeks again.  Let me tell you, coronavirus has been nothing but good to our entire family.  Never in our lives would we have the chance to have Ethan and Rebecca with us for such an extended period of time so it is such a gift.  I love that the top floor is basically theirs with all of us meeting in the middle while John and I have our own wing of the home.  Last week, Ethan asked if we could go see some of the lighthouses since he felt that he needed a day off work and since he hadn't been with us yet.  We scheduled the trip for Friday, and Ethan got the time off work.  However, as the day approached, it looked like the forecast was more favorable (i.e. warmer and less rain) on Saturday, and with John having the entire day off on Saturday, we switched to Saturday. A bonus was that I convinced Mark to come visit us for the weekend.  May 16 and 17 were supposed to be his graduation c...