Just returned home late last night from a lengthy stay in Little Rock. Sometime I'll write about what it was like to watch my aunt Marsue (my mother's twin) die from cancer on the tenth floor of a hospital while my cousin Monica (her daughter) was paralyzed from the neck down and being cared for on the first floor. My cousin was sticken first, and my aunt was diagnosed while there caring for her. It's an almost unbelievably sad situation.

At the end, neither was well enough to be able to visit the other. My other cousin, Leslie, who owns a cross stitch and framing business in Bolivar, has spent 53 days there, never leaving the hospital, running back and forth between her mother and her sister. My mother and I were there the past eight days, trying to help as much as we could.

While we were there, we met an incredible group of women who are Monica's friends from her church and her work for the Arkansas Baptist Convention. They have organized committees to take care of every need, down to lawn mowing, mail gathering, and "hospital sitting." Over the days we were there, they were so sweet and kind that I found myself wishing they were my friends as well. For days, they were with us every step of the way, holding us up both physically and spiritually. They were truly representative of the strength and power of Godly women.

While I was gone, Karin and Stacey and Allison did a great job keeping everything else going here at Scrapbook Generation. I'm actually not sure they need me at all!

To update you just a little, we did receive a great assortment of albums from Pioneer. There are several solid color albums with a photo opening on the cover, as well as new silk albums in great jewel tone colors.

There is also a new collection of papers and matching tags and letters from SEI. The papers are combinations of aqua, tan, black, rust and gray, and are perfect for boyish or manly scrapbook pages.