Josephine: Welcome to Our New Grandbaby!

A wonderful addition to our Gap Year arrived yesterday in the person of Josephine Catherine Harrington. Welcome Josie! She’s the daughter of our son Timothy and his wife Jessica and has a big brother named Cornelius whom you’ve heard about. We haven’t met Josie yet as she was born in Mountain View, CA where Tim moved recently to work for Google.

I don’t want this welcome to sound too casual. A new healthy baby is always a miracle. We now have four grandbabies (ages 3 to one day). If you had asked Sam and me 40 years ago if we were going to take a Gap Year at age 62, we would have said:

Huh?! That’s impossibly old. Nothing happens then.

And if you’d asked us back in college if we pictured ourselves as the parents of three amazing children and, now, four grandchildren, I think we might have replied:

Ha! How could that happen?

One of the pleasures of our Gap Year, heightened by spending it in a quieter place than DC, is that we have more time for reflection. We are so lucky and we have been blessed. I don’t take it for granted. I am savoring it.

Savor, BTW, is the word-of-the-year that Timothy and Jessica suggested we adopt several years ago. Thanks, guys. Oh, and thanks for the new grandbaby.