Family: link to our past, bridge to our future

We had the incredible opportunity to visit Chiara's Great-Great Grandma Pitschka, in Minnesota. She is 95 years older than Chiara and is still living by herself!!! That's pretty amazing. We had a lovely visit and she told us about moving with her mother from Iowa to Minnesota. Her mother made a deal to farm some land and plowed it all herself. Grandma Pitschka remembers picking strawberries in the summer. She also remembers her mother canning quite a bit. When Grandma Pischka was a young mother she would can two to three hundred cans each summer. She worked hard on their land as well. When she was pregnant her husband was away working during the days sometimes and she would have to climb a ladder on the outside of the barn up to the hayloft and shovel hay to the animals in the barn (She went on the outside because she was scared of their ram's bad temper). She believes to this day that the strain of the ladder is the reason her daughter was born with the cord around her neck.

We enjoyed hearing her stories and a snack of doughnuts (YUM). We wish we lived closer so we could visit more often, but we feel so blessed for Chiara to have met such a neat lady.