SARAH BRECKEN HAMILTON

Our son Jon and his wife Jamie welcomed their second daughter into the world Monday, May 19, 2008, at 2:52a.m.

Happy parents and new daughter, a mere 2-1/2 hours after Jamie started labor!! Sarah weighed 7 pounds 15 ounces, and was 20 inches long.

When I first held her, the next day, I started crying and kept saying to her, "Is it really you???"

Grandma and her newest granddaughter.

Every girl loves our son Jon, especially when he's her daddy.

In the late afternoon, Abbie came in, brought after school by her Grandma Judy, and I got to hold my two youngest granddaughters together.

Abbie is an "old hand" at being a big sister in this picture, having been the first family member to hold her after Mommy and Daddy the day before.

Abbie chose Sarah's first name, insisting from the moment she knew there was a baby that it was Sarah. She would not entertain the possibility that it might be a boy or that there could be any other name for her. Jon found her middle name. It's Scottish (like the Hamilton ancestry) and means "freckled."

So we now have 4 grandchildren: Collin, 12; Gracie (Grayson), 9; Abbie, 5; and Sarah, now not quite 48 hours old. Then there's Hevan(pronounced ay-vahn): he's the 5-month-old son of Cecile, who came to us as an exchange student from France in 1997 and instantly became our daughter. That makes her husband Joachim our son-in-law, and their son Hevan our grandson.

Sarah. I'm never going to let you go -- I want to hold you in my arms forever. I get to see you every week or two until Christmas. Whatever made me think I might rather have been hiking?