FILLED to the brim and overflowing

Do you ever feel as if you are so happy that you might just overflow? That is how I've been feeling. I don't cry often, but I think "if I get any happier I'm going to cry!" Does that make sense?

I have been extremely busy the past two weeks. I haven't even made time to pick up the paper. I had a huge assignment from the shop so I stayed up to get the cards made. Then, I wanted to make a little baby book for my friend Elisa, so I stayed up to do that. I has been close to midnight or twelve-thirty nearly every night!

Elisa had her daughter too soon. At thirty-one weeks. Her tiny little baby was only three pounds, four ounces at birth. I was able to meet her this week and she now weighs a whopping seven pounds and is twenty inches long and doing very well! She is now two months old.

Introducing Miss Audrey

The duggles and I are leaving on a jet plane this evening. We are flying to Portland, Oregon. Then we will drive out to a little hippie town called Manzanita. Then we will return to Portland and on Monday will do the famous Powell's book store. Then we will drive through the gorge and finally to dug's brother's apple farm where we are going to help with the apple harvest. I've never been to the pacific northwest but am very excited about our trip. I read Annie Dillard's book, The Living a few years ago. It is a very long book, spanning several generations, fiction based on historic fact. If you haven't read it, you might consider it. I was pulled in by the first sentence.

This very well may be the first vacation that Doug and I have done where we aren't out to challenge our bodies physically. We have backpacked in the Rocky Mountains and canoed in the Boundary Waters and last year, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, we hiked down into the Grand Canyon ,(7 hours) stayed at Phantom Ranch, and hiked out (7.5 hours) on my birthday!

We will get some hiking in and we will be picking apples. One of my friends said "don't they have a machine to do that?"

My friends insist that I "unplug," so I am not taking my laptop. I'm not certain if I will be online at all, so you may not hear from me for awhile. I will return on the twelfth of October. Doug keeps saying "have you told her?" I haven't come right out and said "Chelsea, mommy and daddy will be gone for awhile, but we will be back." But she knows. My cat Milo had to be dead center on the bed as we packed and vocally protested each time Doug put her on the floor. Chelsea paced around, nosing at our feet. She knows something is up.

This was her face this morning.

She was so forlorn. She knows. Don't tell me that she doesn't.

So happy to be happy! I hope this find you happy, too. I will return. "Buh-bye."
(waving and smiling.)