ByGrace

It's been quite a while since I last checked in with you, but I wanted to say hello today. It's my 50th birthday! And I don't quite know how it happened! On the way to church on the last day of my forties! I've gotten quite sappy in the weeks leading up to my birthday. My natural tendency is to be emotional and sentimental (I love nothing better than looking at old pictures and talking about old memories!), so of course the approach of my 50th birthday turned my thoughts toward sentimental things. Here are some of my thoughts lately: 1. Time really does fly. I have a hard time believing I'm actually 50 years old. It seems like just a week or two ago I was a teen girl meeting the boy who would become my husband, then getting married and having my babies. Those years flew by. Then I had small children, then teenagers, now young adults. I clearly remember being the ages my children are now. Yet here I am, already 50. Most likely, there is more time behind me t

I was going to have a new Worth the Read post ready for you this morning, but we have some important news that's much more interesting than that. At least to me it is. These two are having a baby! Our first grandbaby! A few facts about this sweet little development:  Baby is due September 27, 2015 Juliana is doing fine, mostly evening sickness, and the pregnancy is progressing well This will be the first grandchild on both sides of the family On the Hutchens side, it will also be the first great-grandchild It will also be the first great-great-grandchild for Wesley's grandparents We hope to get a five-generation photo after Baby comes, Lord willing This baby will be my parents' third great-grandchild My youngest sister, who got married last March , is also expecting her first baby . . .  the same week ! I, the oldest sister in my family, will become a grandmother the same week that Rebekah, the youngest sister, will be

A couple of weeks ago, I found a treasure trove of DMC embroidery floss at the thrift store. I snatched it right up, but when I got home I realized I didn't have anywhere to store my sudden wealth of floss. I had found a storage box with the bunch of floss I bought, and I had one already at home, but I quickly realized I was going to need about 4 boxes to store all this floss. I also have a new floss goal: at least one skein of each color floss that DMC makes! Anyway, storing all that floss in boxes is no problem, but when I'm working on a project (like Keeping Room ), I don't want to cart 4 boxes of floss around the house and have to constantly open different boxes to find the floss I need. And there was no way I could - or would - take all that floss with me on a trip, which is one of my favourite times to work on cross stitch projects! So I began a search online for a pattern to make an organizer that would hold floss, scissors, needles, hoop, pattern, and the actu

Continuing on in sharing our trip with you, today I'll show you pictures from Westminster Abbey and The Churchill War Rooms. This day was rainy, and we stood outside Westminster Abbey for probably 30-45 minutes for the tour.  It was a pleasant morning of exploring yet another famous historical landmark. The Abbey was built, as were many other landmarks, over 1,000 years ago. While the architecture was absolutely amazing, what I found most interesting were the hundreds of people buried inside the building! There are quite a few "chapels" containing the remains of various members of royalty, but the floor is also full of graves! I knew there were graves at the Abbey, but I assumed there was a cemetery; I had no idea people were buried in the floors! Waiting in the rain We saw the graves of many famous people, but the one we most enjoyed seeing was the grave of  missionary David Livingstone . I wish we could have taken a picture of it, but again, there were no pictu

This post contains affiliate links ! One of my favourite bloggers, BooMama , aka Sophie Hudson, wrote a book a couple of years ago sharing stories of her southern roots. I knew about the book, but . . . you know . . . I just never got around to reading it. Until a couple of weeks ago. Sophie has a new book that just came out, Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong , so I thought maybe I should read the first one. I'm sharp like that. And now I want to share it with you (in case you're like me and like to wait two years till a new book comes out to read the first one). In A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet: Southern Stories of Faith, Family, and Fifteen Pounds of Bacon , you'll meet all of Sophie's family, including her gracious hostess mama, Ouida; her Southern-gentlewoman mother-in-law, Martha; Martha's mother, Sissie, and a host of other relatives that will make you laugh till you cry, and then turn the tables on you and ma

I hope you're enjoying the pictures of our globe-trotting adventures! I'm trying to get these done quickly, but I don't want to lump everything together into one post. Thanks for reading! On Tuesday of our week in London, we visited the place I did not want to miss: Buckingham Palace! I was super excited about seeing the palace and visiting the various attractions related to it. The famous balcony The first thing we did was walk around to the front of the palace and just look. We wanted to see the guards, the balcony where the royal family gathers to wave at the crowds, the changing of the guard . . . anything I could see without getting in trouble! ;) The most amazing thing to me was that the palace is just right there in the city! Of course, I knew that, but I didn't realize that there would be traffic going right past, and that we could just walk right beside it. I'm sure there are plenty of security measures in place, but I was surprised that we co