And Baby Makes Three

Just Joe and Amy

And baby makes three

They're happy in

Raleigh, N.C.

That's just awful, but it has been running through my head since Kris and I returned to Colorado yesterday. It was a wonderful visit to family in the Tarheel state and in Virginia, and our first look at baby Violet was a highlight of the trip we'll not soon forget. Holding new life as your own years are dwindling perceptibly is a treat that's hard to duplicate and impossible to beat.

Little Violet has a floppy epiglottis, so she wheezes and honks as she breathes. Somehow this endears her to us even more. She's so precious. As we drove away from Raleigh towards Blacksburg on the second leg of our vacation odyssey I casually asked Kris how she liked the baby. She said, "I'm a goner. I'm in love."

So am I.

We pretty much ate our way across the Old Dominion, lots of restaurant meals, many receipts in my wallet, and an aversion to getting on the scale now that we're back home.

Daughter Jennie and her husband Brian are doing one of the finest things I can recall, inviting our son Danny and his wife Bethany to live with them. Danny and Bethany are having serious financial problems and this will help them enormously. Needless to say, I'm tremendously gratified by their behavior and very proud of them.

We returned to Colorado Springs to a flap brought about by our congressman, the lamentable Doug Lamborn, who referred to the president as a "tarbaby." What a dope! Even setting aside the rudeness of the remark (And can you imagine the furor of the talk radio people if a Democrat had said something similar about President Bush.) there's the matter of the latent racism in his use of the term.

My friends and neighbors here will re-elect him easily.

The decline of the stock market since the budget deal last week has prompted the Christian left website to wonder if the Republicans have lost more money in the plummeting market than they would have spent had there been a tax increase on the wealthy.

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