We are all back home in Chisana and had just enough time to unpack and get ready to celebrate a big milestone of one of our own. My very own little Alaska Chick-let is now officially, no longer a baby. (As explained, if you have to use two hands ~ or more ~ to show how old you are, you are no longer the “baby”!)

We did have an earlier birthday party, while we were still in Tok, so that all the family there would be able to attend and share some love too. We had a pizza party with a huge cake and more ice cream than could be believed, in Tok at Grandma’s Candy’s house.

Returning home, the very next day Bella told me what she wanted more than anything, was for Mommy to ride with her. So I did and it was wonderful. (It is always great to be back in the saddle!) The only disappointing news was that according to all the weather reports, a big storm was on its way.

I can deal with that!

We had a wonderful (even if it was ch-ch-chilly!) and I have never seen Bella more enraptured than this 6th Birthday. I thought that you may enjoy sharing the party with us, so I created a slideshow to share with you. Please enjoy it and know that if you were supposed to be here, and weren’t ~ you were missed.

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Here are some of my favorite quotes that best explain how and whom I consider my family.

“It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.”  ~Johann Schiller

“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

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”  ~Oprah Winfrey

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”  ~C.S. Lewis

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”  ~Jane Howard

“‘Ohana means family – no one gets left behind, and no one is ever forgotten.”  ~Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch

“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

“Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person – having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”  ~Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

“When something is missing in your life, it usually turns out to be someone.”  ~Robert Brault

“True friends stab you in the front.”  ~Oscar Wilde

Happy Birthday to my own little Alaska Chick-let! My precious Isabella Rose, named by her brother Zachariah. Isabella ~ “Consecrated to God” Rose ~ From the love given to Zach as a baby from one of my closest friends, Kerry-Rose Maher. Isabella Rose.