12 Years of Wooly Bliss

12 years today and we are still slinging bales together. I know women who are lone shepherds but it sure is easier with a Big Daddy to do most of the heavy lifting. The family members in this picture are making their own journeys through life. Let's do an update on them:

Maggie - Shepherd, Goatherd, Crazy Cat Lady, Special Education Teacher, picker, dyer, spinner, sewer, cremer, buttonmaker, anything to hustle a buck to feed the sheep!

Matt - a carpenter who found another career as the Director of Training for a non-profit group that trains weatherization workers and whose predominant mission is to keep low-income people warm and influence public policy on their behalf. Weatherization is the great love of his life but I am a close second and the farm rates somewhere way down low!

Hannah - age 12, my first granddaughter and a tall, beautiful, girl who loves clothes and is a talented artist, just like her Daddy, my son, Eric. Hannah's brother, Luke, was not to come along for another 3 years after this picture was taken.

Annie, 41 - Hannah's mother and Eric's wife, is a grant writer for the Boy Scouts of America, and President of her own consultant company, working out of their big brick house in Flower Mound, Texas, a suburb of Dallas

Mia, 30 - my only daughter, twin A, age 31, who will marry her fiance, Andrew, on February 19, 2011. Mia is a RN BSN at Morristown Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. She is working on a MSN at the Univ. of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, NJ.

AJ, 30 - twin B with Mia. AJ is a seminarian at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary in Yonkers, New York. He is a 1st Lieutenant in the US Army National Guard and will be an Army Chaplain when he is ordained in the spring. Who knows what the Army will do with him then.

Eric, 40 - big man in the Boy Scouts of America, now working at the National Boy Scouts Council in Irving, Texas. Eric was put in charge of the construction of the new permanent Boy Scout Jamboree site and adventure center on the New River in West Virginia. He must raise twenty million dollars to augment the fifty million donated by the Bechtel family.

Sean Redmond, 33, - Matt's son from his passionate but brief marriage as a child. Sean is a California boy, and is the webmaster for a big jewelry company in Oakland.

Brian Redmond, 35ish,- Matt's nephew, talented chef and member of the Big Apple Circus troupe, New York, New York

Michael Redmond, 61 - Matt's older brother, editor of a local newspaper, the Princeton Packet, in Princeton, New Jersey. Married to Loretta Jankowksi, classical pianist, movie music composer and piano teacher in Mountainside, New Jersey.

Life goes on and we are all too far away from each other, something driven home painfully at Christmas time. I love them all.