My son, Joseph Kip

Yep, this is the one I have been threatening to tell the story of. He is the "tiny" one in the back taking up enough room for two children. That is his wife Audra next to him. Now there is a story in its own; we call her "Grizz" short for old grizzley. Doesn't that sound like there is a story there?

Oh, before I forget, the anniversary was great. King Kong was as good as we had been told, however, we had Papa Murphy's pizza (Cheryl's request) and I watched one of the best football games I have seen in many years between Penn St. and Florida St. (I know, I know not too many of you like football, sheesh)

Joseph Kip was born October 28, 1966 in Driggs, Idaho. Upon his arrival someone had to beat him to get him to breathe. When we all first seen him we started screaming and I started asking his mother questions about her whereabouts 9 months previous. The doctor even tried to return him back to where he came from but his mother would have none of that. Now, look at the picture above, who could resist such a smiling, chubby cheeked face like that?

Every family has the one child that is attracted to accidents, illnesses or whatever else could go wrong; Kip is our child. Sure Mike has broken his shoulder, Kim has cut her ear in half, Leslie has lost the tip of her finger from having a door shut on it, Katie has rammed a stick in her lip and made all the doctors laugh, but Kip, Kip has had it all.

I think it started when he was less than one year old. We lived in a tiny mobile home situated on a piece of property in the middle of nothing. In Teton Valley we would get some very severe thunder and lightening storms; this one night we had a doozy. Cheryl and I were in the back of the trailer and Kip was in his bed in the living room. The lightening was popping, the thunder was crashing so hard the trailer would actually rock. As we lay there we wondered how Kip was doing but being cowards, the both of us, we just hid under our bedsheets and waited. There was a horrible crash and we could tell the lightening had hit mighty close. We looked down the hall and could see electricity arching on the doors of the hallway closet. That was enough to make us get up and check on our baby.

I walked out into the living room area and it was fairly quiet. I thought with all the noise and electricity Kip would be crying and scared to death. Nope, not so. He was lying in his bed looking up at the ceiling and laughing. Stupid kid, didn't he know the situation was serious? Laughing I am telling you. We stood there in amazement and shook our heads. We knew then that this kid was veeeerrrryyyy different.

At the risk of making this too long for one blog I will stop here. I will say that he was a happy baby. He used to chase me in his walker and I would be on my motorcycle; we would go around and around the car just having fun. When he was about 5, I think, he fell out of a pickup while helping feed cattle and broke his arm; and so started a saga of accidents, injuries and all sorts of things that I will try and remember. Tomorrow, the tree falling on him.