Happy Birthday, Benjamin!

Yesterday marked the 10th birthday of our youngest, Benjamin. Sigh ... now all of our four young people are in double-digits. (I can't be this old, can I?)

The huge storm that passed through Southern California yesterday, bringing 60 mph winds, almost 2 1/2 inches of rain (over 10% of our annual rainfall), hail, and snow definitely put a damper on celebrating B's big day. Our trip to Disneyland, made possible by annual passes my parents purchased for us last year, has been postponed until tomorrow (Wednesday) in the hopes of having dry weather -- important because my electric scooter doesn't do well in rain. We had also planned a family dinner in San Diego at Chili's, but that had to be postponed as well because the worst of the storm arrived around dinnertime, and driving down and then up the mountain in "Molly" (my weatherbeaten '91 Corolla) just wasn't going to be safe. So Benjamin enjoyed a day without school (although the other boys had to work) and pizza with fresh blueberry pie (baked by Keith Sunday) for dinner and dessert. We watched part of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in front of a roaring fire while the storm hailed and wailed outside.



Benjamin's birthday holds more significance to our family history than the celebration of his birth. December 7 is also Pearl Harbor Day, important to my family as my maternal grandfather, whose middle name we gave Benjamin, was on the USS Ward, the ship that fired upon and sank a Japanese submarine over an hour before the air attack on Pearl Harbor commenced. Clickschooling sent out this really cool timeline from National Geographic that shows what happened at Pearl Harbor, including the Ward's part in the event. And here is a link to an earlier post here (back in 2006, to be precise) on the USS Ward's and my grandfather's part in the events of Pearl Harbor: A Day to Remember; unfortunately, the links to my grandfather's account and the photographs no longer work, but it still tells the story. And the Ward met her end, my grandfather as captain, in Leyte Gulf exactly three years to the day after Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1944.

So December 7 is a day of great significance in our family history, both in the 1940s and now, in the ten years since Benjamin joined our family by the grace of God.