These last 10 days or so have been anything but ordinary and typical. Hopefully someone realized I was sort of missing! I was away from home with z-e-r-o chance to stamp for three days, babysitting and playing with four of my grandchildren. Then I brought three of them home, along with my Swiss cousin who is in the states for three weeks. Then my daughter joined us. And a few days later Bethany, from Switzerland left for the SF Bay Area and her next visitation family.

Then my son and his seven year old joined us. This was our “in the backyard this year camping trip”. We went to the the restored Gold Mining town of Colunbia, Pine Crest lake, played games, played on the swing, played fussball and made s’mores in the back yard.




Thursday they all left for Yosemite and a Swiss friend, Gabriella, whom I hadn’t seen for over 15 years arrived for an overnight after being in Yosemite for a few days. She brought along a lovely Finnish, now Swiss, work colleague. We got to talk, eat, sip wine, listen to Mr. Trump’s ‘acceptance speech’, discuss a lot (Europeans are trying to make sense of this whole thing) and go to bed. This morning, after a breakfast of Dutch Babies (it’s an egg/flour/milk/butter yummy concoction) we took an hour or so and stamped before Gabrielle and Aija headed for Calistoga by way of the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, CA. They were so excited to know it was directly on their route to Calistoga.
We did manage to set aside an hour for them to make their own cards. I had them each choose a card from my samples and this is what they made:





And now I can get back to stamping on a regular basis. I’ve missed it.