We left our camera charger in Utah.

And that's why I'm still posting vacation photos.

It's sad because, I might have been able to get a video of Ella singing "Happy Birthday, dear Dadd'n". Which she has been singing on and off since I taught it to her on Tuesday. (Yes, Paul is the big Two-Nine.) (But I like to tell people he is thirty, like I accidentally forgot.) (Because it makes him mad.) (He doesn't get that thirty is the new twenty.) My original plan was for her to sing just the last word in each phrase, like she does most other songs. But, I failed to account for the fact that it basically has the same lyrics in each phrase, so she picked it up pretty quickly. So that was fun. Another "trick" for Paul to try to get her to do to impress the family. Which she, no doubt, will refuse to perform on command. Kids these days.

I do love this picture, though. The morning after we arrived in Utah, the first thing Paul did was pull out the golf clubs and hollow golf balls out of grandma's garage. (Which wait for him there, no matter how long it's been since we've visited.) And started hitting balls accross the yard.

I watched him from inside, and watched my sweet daughter try her luck with a golf club of her own, and it just felt like home. Grandma's house is one of those few places that seems to stand still in time. We can change, and grow, and have crazy amounts of babies, and still know that there are cookies in the freezer, and ham and cheese in the fridge. We can invite friends over for game night, and know that Grandma will stay up with us all hours of the night playing something she'd never even heard of until that day. We can all sit around talking for hours, or just sit reading our own books companionably. We have Sunday dinner, and gather in the kitchen to clean up, which for some reason, is one of my favorite times. Maybe because it was in that kitchen, doing those dishes, that I first knew that I belonged to the Christensens, the same way I belong to my own family. It was a nice vacation.

Life is going on about as usual here. Paul still studies more than I would like. But, I'm just being selfish. He's doing great in school, and we are hoping to hear if we have an offer from at&t this week. Wish us luck!