Audrey J Burton

If there is one thing this family has learned to do, it’s launching. Not rockets or campaigns. Just starting out on our own. Both my husband and I went into the service. I was 17 and he was 19. We learned to make it without the benefit of family around us. Our kids picked their own times to leave home. Our oldest came home one day and said, “Mom, I just think it’s time to find out if I can take … [Read more...]

If there is one thing I can truly appreciate about the era I grew up in, it’s how patriotic everyone was at the time. Most of us had parents that had fought in WWII. Some had grandparents that fought in WWI and many folks had seen battle in Korea. By the time I was old enough to understand the concept of war, I saw neighborhood boys going off to Vietnam and the day came when my older brother … [Read more...]

We all know how important first impressions are and we try to put our best foot forward. It doesn’t matter if it’s a first date, meeting your future in laws, interviewing for a new job, or going for that coveted promotion. We are almost painfully aware of how we look, what we sound like, and the words we use. In that same vein, we usually know when we’ve blown it. More times than not, we don’t … [Read more...]

All too often we forget that things don’t just happen overnight. As a society who seems to need instant gratification these days, it’s hard to understand the logic or need to slow it down a bit. I was thinking how much life is like a football game. Bear with me, since I am fan, I might see this comparison a little bit more easily, but I think you’ll be able to follow me. For starters, everyone … [Read more...]

I recently posed a question on my personal Facebook page to get people’s thoughts on something. I asked,” When your kids start doing genealogy in school, are you honest about their lineage, if say Dad isn’t the biological father, or there was some dark secret in the family’s past concerning parentage?” And a follow-up had to do with what age people thought it was appropriate to tell kids the … [Read more...]

When we found out we were having a baby over 40 years ago, we were like most young parents. We were excited and terrified. What if we weren’t good parents? What if we weren’t ready? What if we were too hard or too soft and ended up with a brat? These babies didn’t come with manuals and all we had to fall back on was the way we were raised. We might not have agreed with everything our parents did, … [Read more...]