Thanks everyone...She is as sweet as she is pretty and very smart. She started washing dishes in a nursing home when she was in the 11th grade to save money for college. She worked all the way through college and made very good grades and she had Isaiah in April and graduated in May. She took a weekend off to have the baby...lol

Congratulations to your grandson Tyler. I have 2 granddaughters that are graduating this year one yesterday and one next week in Florida. I do believe that I heard that Lillians was also broadcast via the computer. So nice to get to hear their names and watch them walk so proudly across the stage. Mary

We are benefiting from your education, too, Seniorgal! Do you have a few more memoirs in mind, ready to type up for our enjoyment? My DM had such a good education in her one-room school in rural Rhode Island that when her family moved to the city, the high school didn't know where to place her. She'd already completed their requirements, but she was only thirteen. She, too, had responsible jobs that today would not be open to anyone without a college degree. Not to take anything away from you, or from my DM, but...what's happened to make today's HS diploma so "worthless"?

As someone else said, many are afraid to fly ... but not worried about driving to the airport. While for 100,000 miles per person travel, there are many more deaths in a car than flying. When someone is killed in a car crash, there may be a small write-up in a local paper/TV/radio. When there's a plane crash, usually there's a substantial number killed and it makes a fairly major news splash, over a fairly wide area. When I was about three or four, about a dozen neighbours had gathered at our larger than average for the neighbourhood farm to help get our wheat threshed, and several of the wives were helping Mom get meals ready in the house, which was about 300 feet along a gravelled country road from a paved provincial highway. The threshing machine was at a barn about 500 feet away and one of the neighbours told Dad, who was arranging straw on the strawstack, that there was a kid on the highway that could well be his. Dad took a look at the situation, saw Mom heading at rather high speed down the gravel road, and said that he figured that the situation was being taken care of. I think that Mom found a small sapling and gave me a tuning up around the legs on the trip back to the house. That was about 1932-3 when, shortly after 1929, the year of the crash in the stock market, and my birth, (and wasn't that the year that the Model "A" Ford was introduced?) there was not much money floating around during the depression and there weren't a large number of slower-moving cars on the road and people drove quite carefully (mostly). I was 10 when World War II started, the hired hands went to war, so for several years of caring for crops, milking and beef cows, horses, pigs and chickens ... what Dad, this young lad and a couple of younger brothers got done ... got done ... and the rest didn't. So I learned early about choosing priorities, hard work, etc. ... and increasing responsibilities was part of the game. Mom was hospitalized from when I was just under 6 and Dad didn't ride hard herd on me ... but when I did stupid stuff - I heard about it! When my two were small, we lived in a small town or village in rural areas. Our kids played with others, and if I recall correctly were allowed at that age to go alone to a friend's house, and I think that we seldom called to see whether s/he'd arrived: often, in good weather, we'd soon see them near the neighbour's house (if we looked). And by age six walked alone, or with friends, but not in a pre-arranged fashion, a couple of blocks along a village street to school. Granted - things are somewhat different now, but I think less so than sometimes we worry about. The new generation is going to have to be more self-reliant than people were just a few years ago, as long-term employment is becoming much scarcer ... and I heard the other day that within about 15? years, we can well find that about 40% of current jobs are likely to disappear. But a substantial percentage of the post-secondary education crowd currently suffer from anxiety, even depression ... with a few taking their own lives. It's tough being a parent, but it is crucially important that we encourage, support and require that our offspring learn in a step by step fashion to become independent. ole joyful ... who has no grandkids