From Bret's Childhood...

Last Spring we got a random message on our voicemail:  someone from near Eatonville (2 hrs away from us) had a child's rocking chair that she was wondering if belonged to Bret and if he wanted it back.  I listened to the message and then said something to Bret along the lines of "some lady just left us a message saying she has a rocking chair with your name on the bottom of it, how weird is that?" and Bret responded with "oh yeah, I remember that chair". 

HUH??

Turns out that Bret had the little rocking chair from when he was a kid, but then his family had a house fire and moved and the chair turned into one of those "what ever happened to that?" items.

So I called the lady back and said yes, she had the right person and yes, we'd love to have the chair!  She didn't remember how she'd gotten it, but there's a plaque glued to the bottom with Bret's name on it and she'd been looking in the yellow pages and online trying to find the right person to give it back to.  Pretty cool of her!

...this is the part of the story where time passes...and I think I lose the lady's phone number but then I find it, pretty much exactly where I thought I'd put it but under some other stuff...and we call the lady back and it's no problem, the chair is right where she had it before, just waiting for us to come get it whenever we have time...only at this point a year has gone by and we decide that we should just make the drive to go get the chair rather than wait until we're "in the area", because obviously we are never just going to be conveniently passing by...

So now we have the chair and it's pretty beat up but I love that it's something from Bret's childhood that we have now for our kids.  And even better - there is a long history associated with this chair.  The plaque on the bottom says:

"This chair originally given to Margaret Murphy Countryman by her family (1877-1955).  Subsequently by Gertrude Murphy List to Geraldine List Adams.  In August of 1975, given to Bret Totten, a great great nephew of Mrs. Countryman."

Geraldine Adams is Bret's maternal grandmother.  Such a fun piece of history to have back in our family...I think it's so cool that the Eatonville woman held on to this chair and kept trying to find out who it belonged to!

Gabe in Daddy's chair