My favorite things 19

Our house was built in 1963, when room-to-room intercoms were all the rage.  I know this because our previous house was also built in that era.  When we moved into that house in 1974 the intercom worked for a while, but soon died; apparently a decade or so was all you could get out of those systems.  Besides, our kids had a way of ignoring it when you called on the intercom.  If you confronted them they would innocently say "I guess I must have been in the bathroom."

By the time we moved into this house, its intercom was more than 20 years ago and dead as a doornail.  In most of the rooms I simply hung a picture over the useless speaker.  But when we had our kitchen remodeled, I had a little niche built into the hole where the intercom master station had been.  I put my armadillo statue into the niche, where it fit perfectly.

Over the years, though, the niche has become baby-picture central.  A few tiny 1970s pictures of my kids and their cousins, and a lot of newer, bigger, more colorfast photos of their respective children.  I change the photos out every now and then to display the newest baby, or maybe to pull out an old picture that hasn't been on view for a while.

You can barely see the armadillo behind the babies.

And best of all, as of yesterday morning, there's a new granddaughter whose picture will soon be front and center.