My grandfather on my mother's side - for Japan.

My father's oldest brother - for the allies.

(And he was a marine in the pacific so in a way - they were fighting each other. But he was never less than lovely to my mother.)

All sleepy. Wants a vacation, I does.

I am so overwhelmed.

I'm sleepy FROM my vacation! Somehow, in CA I kept waking up at 4:30 in the morning, but last night in NY I couldn't fall asleep. How is it that I'm on eastern time in CA and western time in NY? Not on, dudes.

My grandmother's brother - flew bombers over Europe.

My grandfather's brother - Army something or other. I think he was at Omaha Beach, but I'm not for sure.

Both survived the war and it turns out, I have the only surviving picture of my grandma's brother with his plane. Being evil, I've been using it as leverage with my uncle who has all of the family pictures from my grandparent's house.

My grandfathers helped dig the Panama Canal. We didn't have applicable wars, but we sure did know manual labour.

Can I haz more sleep?

Oh, and, I'm not buying clothes any more, but I noticed this lovely top in the clearance catalogue J Jill sent me with my recent purchase. So pretty. A bit too sheer, but pretty.

I'm too lazy for an actual meara, but...

I did not know that Waltzing Matilda meant anything other than a dancing woman named Matilda. Cool to know.

Liese, I love the love story in your family's tree. I think it sounds so romantic.

Finally, Ellie loved lemons as a baby. Weird, but she would eat them whenever she could get them from my water.

Oh, and Ellie is the only baby girl in her daycare *not* to have her ears pierced. I get asked when I'm going to do it all. the. time.

A few years ago my father wrote a memoir of his Navy service in WWII. He had never talked about the war, so I was surprised to see all of his adventures. D-Day, running Yugoslav commandos along the Adriatic coast, supplying Algerian resistance fighters. At one point they were supposed to drop a small group of British commandos behind German lines near Venice, but the Germans were in frantic retreat, and the enemy lines kept receding, so in the end my father's little ship sailed right up to St. Mark’s and dropped a gangplank, and the Brits took over the city. I studied in Italy when I was in college, and I’ve been to Venice a couple of times since then, so it was strange to think of the times I stood right there at St. Marks without knowing about this.

Since reading the memoir, I’m paying closer attention. I was in Paris for a conference a couple of years ago, so I took a train up to the little village on the Normandy coast where my father was stranded just after D-Day. It was very moving, both for me and for the locals that I swapped stories with. I feel very fortunate that my father took the time to record his experiences.

None of my immediate relatives fought in any wars that I know of. My mom (as a girl) collected milkweed pods that they used to make parachutes.