My husband went to a family get together last week and his mom brought this drawing that he did of his dad when he was 14 years old...35 years ago! Apparently she had been cleaning out the basement and she came across it. My husband had long forgotten that this drawing...

My oldest son is a wonderful person but he is not very good about remembering things like birthdays, anniversaries, or special occasions so imagine my surprise when he sent me a package nearly a month before Mother's Day because he was leaving the country at the beginn...

It is with mixed feelings that I say goodbye to my Samsung Galaxy S5 Smartphone. I was hoping that it would last until the S8 comes out sometime in 2017 but in the last few weeks, it went downhill fast. It started shutting down for no particular reason. It started exit...

Just over five years ago, my oldest son joined the Army. It was not the path that I expected or wanted him to take but it was the path that was right for him. Though I worried about his safety and well being, I felt at peace with his decision and had this sense that ev...

My daughter took a ceramics class in 7th grade and one of her assignments was to create a whistle that looks like another item. She chose to make her whistle look like an old Polaroid camera. These cameras were quite popular when I was young so I recognized it right aw...

When my first child was born, my sister gave him this ceramic rocking horse (or technically a rocking unicorn) as a baby gift. She lovingly selected the ceramic piece, thoughtfully chose the paint colors and painstakingly painted every detail. It is a gift that came fr...

My friend's now teenage daughter drew this picture of herself when she was in elementary school. The original has survived years in a storage box but you never know when something might go wrong. There could be a fire or a flood. It could get lost in a move. A younger...

This will be my last family history post for a while. A couple of the items in this picture were already discussed in previous posts. The oil lamp was discussed in my World War II Era Keepsakes post. The wick trimmer was mentioned in my Antique Kitchen Items post. The...

After World War II, my grandparents struggled along with the rest of Europe to rebuild their lives and a sense of normalcy. After several years of struggling, they decided that there weren't many opportunities for recovery in Holland. In the winter of 1949, they booke...

These are some interesting brass antiques that were passed down from my grandparents to my mom. The largest item is a church collection container. You can see two openings on the top. The larger, rectangular opening was for dropping coins into the pot. The smaller, rou...