I hope it was an enjoyable meeting.

Barefoot I still think ya should of grabbed more but hey you won't be as sore as some of us. LOL Then comes the Fall swap!!!! Yea I'm getting excited just thinking about it. This is a great group & I think we should all post pictures as our babies grow this summer. Tell Ruben sorry about the tail end of him, he bent over just as I was taking the picture & then my batteries went dead. Debbie

If it's not going to be in a kitchen, any sealant will do. The advantage of the butcher block oils such as Waterlox, the stuff IKEA sells, etc. is that you can re-apply it right over the top of the old stuff, after a steel wool rubdown. Pick something that dries fast, which means Waterlox is out. It smells vile, like all tung oil, and takes 24 hours to dry and cure. Be sure to seal top and bottom (and the ends and sides). Do not listen to the people who say it doesn't matter. I had an IKEA countertop, and I was using the bottom side for stain and finish experiments ... ran into supply problems and stopped the kitchen project. That countertop warped as soon as the high humidity of our rainy season started. If you put a straightedge across it, there was about an inch deflection between the middle and the edge. Yes, it eventually straightened out, but it's not a good thing.

The practice of naming a new baby after an ancestor is something that started hundreds of years ago. It actually is something that helps in genealogy research. :-) The first-born male would be named after his paternal grandfather, for example. Many times I've seen posts here at the KT where folks make disparaging comments about names given to kids "these days." And probably deservedly so. These are names that are not connected to their family history in any way, shape, or form. They're simply names that the parents invent so that their kid will have a name that no one else has (or would want, for that matter). Some of these names are downright weird, and anyone can tell that it's a brand new name. But Leon is a name that has been around for a very long time, and so is Knox. While most folks would have Knox as a surname, it is not at all uncommon for a new baby to be given a family name as a middle name. And it's not at all uncommon for a new baby to be given an ancestor's middle name as a first name. If you've done ANY genealogy research at all, you can see how easily Knox could move from a surname to a middle name to a first name. I, too, have been hoping that no one reading this thread has a beloved ancestor named Knox or Leon.