George and Tommie are two very special people to me. They, in fact, are my grandparents. This past weekend my family and I went up to New York to help celebrate my grandfather's 89th birthday! This was a birthday I really didn't want to miss...I mean 89! It was a really special time for all of us. While I was in Kenya, my grandfather went to the doctors for a check up where they discovered cancer. He is also suffering from emphysema and it seems now that one or the other will eventually take him from us. So, this is the time of life to celebrate him and to enjoy him....to ask him questions about his life and to soak in his answers. Its the time of life to laugh with him and to hug him. Its the time to make sure you know him and if there are things you don't know about him, to ask (I found out my great grandfather was also a photographer!). Its the time of life to make sure you don't regret how you spent it with him. His birthday was fantastic. My extended and immediate family and I joined together at my grandparents house to have a bbq and sing happy birthday to "Granddad." My mom baked him a "surprise" cake which has been a family tradition ever since I can remember. My grandma started it years ago where she would bake two round cakes and before she iced them one on top of the other, she would sneak in between the cakes little treasures for us to find. Sometimes they would be pieces of candy or money, and other times it would be jewelery or silly jokes. My mom filled this surprise cake with little trinkets for my grandfather. One of which was a little pin of the plane he flew in WWII, the B-17. At night we all spent together going through an old suit case full of pictures and letters written between my grandparents during the war. It was precious. My grandparents are coming up on their 65th wedding anniversary. How incredible is that? They are quite the testimony to the word COMMITMENT. My grandparents met on a blind date in 1945...a soldier in the army and a nurse. The typical WWII love story. 6 months after their first blind date they were married and my grandmother was swept off her feet and on to a new adventure and a life with George Ahrens. They still look at each other the way I imagine they looked at each other on their first date. I was blessed to be able to capture some amazing pictures of them together this past week and the house they've lived in for most of their life...