Cheri Dreams

For Thanksgiving this year, Dave and I drove up to Fairfield to pick up my brother and niece, then we all traveled up to our Parent's house in Redding to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Hughes family. This was a very Thankful year for me and I was thrilled to be spending this holiday with the ones I love.

During our visit to Redding, my mom, niece (Emily) and husband, Dave, decided to walk a few blocks to the local park. As we walked along the sidewalk, Emily noticed a street sign, which she almost ran into without looking, and on the street sign there was a painted symbol. She asked me what the symbol was and I said it's a Peace sign. Emily looked at me...confused? She said, “What's Peace mean?” Wow, for a moment...I smiled. My 7 yr. old niece asked ME what Peace is. I knew I must think quick. Peace is important to me and I personally feel our Earth would be a wonderful place to live, if peace were more abundant in the world today. Peace is what I remember feeling when I was her age. Now, how do I explain this to her? I thought for a moment and said, “peace is harmony, it's happiness, it's being nice to everyone you meet”. She smiled and looked as if she understood. Within minutes a huge 4x4 truck with a very loud engine drove into the parking lot of the Park. They stopped abruptly to meet their friends, who were enjoying crashing their remote control cars into each other. A man jumped out of his truck and reached out his hand to (what appeared to be) his friend and said, “hey dude, what's up?”. There was a moment of silence, then Emily looked back at me and said, “that's Peace, right Auntie Cheri?”. I smiled and said, “Yes, Emily that's Peace.” What a wonderful life lesson and one I will never forget...
Here are some pics from our Thanksgiving:

I'm so happy it's December!! I have plans to visit all of our immediate family members over the next 3 weeks and will do my best to upload pics and post stories. Hope all of you are enjoying the holiday season :)