We have family staying with us, so no post other than these priceless quotes and this thought: I am SO blessed by my family–those with me now in person and those with me always in heart.
“The family.  We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.” ~Erma Bombeck
“When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses.” ~Joyce Brothers

“You don’t choose your family.  They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” ~Desmond Tutu
“The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit.  No two people – no mere father and mother – as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child.  He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.” ~Pearl S. Buck