What We've Been Up To: 2013-11-03

Friday, November 8, 2013

Cute Cousins

My daughter is just barely reaching that "I wish I could babysit" stage and is absolutely enamored with her new baby cousin. She likes to hold him and sing to him and cuddle him and read to him and play with him and do pretty much anything she can think of to make him smile. To her credit, I do it too. Who wouldn't with such a chill little happy guy? He's got us all wrapped around his finger already.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Our Little Tinker

At Great-grandma and Great-grandpa's 60th wedding anniversary party this year our little man got to meet his twin cousins for the first time. It was instant fun for them, especially when we threw in a tool bench and ATV in need of fixing (okay, so it didn't REALLY need to be fixed, but they're boys, they like to tinker). They spent HOURS in the garage, pretending to screw, hammer, pry, wrench and rotate anything they could reach. It was so cute to see them get along so well and a nice break for the mommies and daddies to get to sit and watch as well.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt

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Friday, November 8, 2013

Cute Cousins

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Our Little Tinker