Our whole family joined in for a most wonderful baby shower for our 15th grandchild!

Even though our family is spread out from Atlanta Georgia to the Olympic Peninsula on the Pacific Coast,  we all came together to celebrate Owen and Mila’s fourth child….a little boy that will be born any day now.  

This will be our 15th grandchild.  We love each one of our dear grandchildren so very much. We have so much love in our hearts for all these children, that it is simply overwhelming.  These big and little creatures that God has blessed us with, that we get to grandparent together, give meaning to our lives.

This day, the day that we all celebrated the newest child in our family, was a good day….a day to remember!

Even Marina, who is studying in Japan, joined in our prayer and celebration of this new wee little life.

This was a good day in all our lives….a day we will always remember. 

Our prayer before our dinner tonight was to give thanks for all the blessings that we are given.  One of these blessings are the bonds and love of our family that stretches across our great country from the Pacific to Atlantic Oceans and throughout the World.

We give thanks to Mila’s Russian family who lives on the other side of the world for our dear Mila. And we pray that they will be able to travel to the United States in the future to see all of us….their family here in the USA.

February 27:

All the Baby Shower gifts of clothes, blankets, toys, and Mila’s post-birth beautiful wine colored dress washed, dried, and ready for Gideon to be born, take his first breath, and be embraced by his loving family.

The new baby carseat is installed in the Rat (our 4Runner). Mila and my go-to-hospital-bags are packed and ready to go.  My Danny is ready to meet Owen with the children and Mila….and take our new Mama and me to the hospital as soon as Mila and Gideon decide to that it is time for his birth.

Soren and Sebastian picked LOTS of fruit for their Aunt Mila and Uncle Owen!

We told Sebastian and Soren that their Aunt Mila, Uncle Owen, Hannah, Vernon, and Robert peel and eat lemons and grapefruit like oranges.  Also that their aunt makes their children lemonade from fresh lemons, that Vernon loves oranges, and that Uncle Owen makes his tea with orange peels.  

When they heard this, both Soren and Sebastian wanted to collect as much fresh fruit for them as possible.

This is the perfect time of year to find boxes of fruit along the streets and pick fruit in Leisure World.  So Grandpa and I drove Sebastian and Soren around Leisure World to find fruit.  The first thing we saw was a man just down the street shaking his lemon tree….and it was “raining” lemons!

Both boys picked LOTS of oranges, lemons, and grapefruit!  

We also found several boxes of grapefruit along the side of the road.  The fruit was set there for anyone to take.  Here is our total haul….

Good thing Owen and Mila have the shed at the cabin where they can store all this treasure.  

Gunfight at the OK Corral….and so much more!

 Our cowboys, Soren and Sebastian, ganged up with us and traveled to Tombstone, Arizona, an old western town that is rich in history from the 1880’s.

We stayed at the 1953 cowboy Larian Motel.  

John Wayne gave the owners of the motel, Larry and Ann (hence the name, Larian Motel) an autographed photo.  My Danny was sure that we stayed in the same room as The Duke, since our room was #1!

We all wore our cowboy shirts as we explored this wild west town where Wyatt Earp with his brothers and Doc Holliday had the famous gun fight in the streets of Tombstone.

We had dinner in the Crystal Palace where all the gamblers, cowboys, gunslingers, and the “ladies of the night" hung out.

The gunslingers stayed clear of Soren when he gave them his “look.”

We’re ready to head underneath the streets of Tombstone to one of the richest silver mines in our country.  

 

The work was done by hand, without machines, in the 1880’s.  It was dug out through solid rock with a hammer and spike.  When the spike was hammered deep enough in several places, the mine was cleared out. Dynamite was packed into the holes made from the spike, charges were set with fuses, and a chunk of rock about two feet square was blown out of the wall of the shaft. The pieces of rock were put into a sack, and a man would drag the sack filled with rocks out of the mine to be processed into silver.  Each sack weighed about 100 pounds.

Then the next day new holes where hammered out.  Day after day, year after year, this process was repeated.

The miners worked 10 hours, six days a week by candlelight in these shafts.  Their lunch was a can of peaches or pears.  Unfortunately, the cans were lined with lead, so the boys who had started to mine at age 15 were kicked out of the mines by the time they were 30, due to their ill health caused by lead poisoning.

These dark rocks are unrefined silver….

There were tunnels and shaft which led off in all directions.  We had traveled 110 feet underground, but the shafts led down to almost 500 feet!  The water table was 500 feet, so the mine never flooded.  

The refined silver was cast into 180 pound “Hershey kisses” shaped blocks.  This helped to prevent theft, as they were difficult, if not impossible, to lift or transport by a single man.

The men who worked to refine the silver had an even worse fate than the miners.  Mercury was used in the refinery process, which resulted in acute mercury poisoning within 2-3 years.

The miners port-a-potty….

Now that we had learned how to mine silver, we’re off to find our own vein of silver and strike it rich!

The Bird Cage Theater was a famous brothel and gambling house in Tombstone in the 1880’s.

These are the “Cribs” high above the stage where the "ladies of the night" “entertained” the cowboys and miners.  The girls were virtual slaves who were not allowed to leave.  They were mistreated, beaten, exploited, and then tossed aside.  

The gambling room was behind the theater.

Statue of Ed Schieffelin, the man who discovered silver in the middle of the desert….the beginning of a booming mining town where men and women flocked to in hopes of finding their fortune.

Very few of these men and women found silver at the end of a rainbow.  Most ended up living a hard, brutal, and short life.

We went back in time to the 1880’s this week.  We had expected to relive the excitement and adventure of the rollicking town mining of Tombstone, where the Gunfight at the OK Corral unfolded.  But instead, we discovered the story of desperate men and women trying to live and survive in a hard world.  We felt the anguish of these people who lived 140 years ago in Tombstone.  

Instead of reading about history, we stepped back in time, and lived in the history of a bygone era.  And we’re happy to live in this country today, not in the wild west.