last day of school

School’s out for summer! School’s out forever. well, ok, not forever, but I do enjoying channelling some Alice Cooper every now and again. To celebrate K’s promotion to 1st grade we went out to dinner tonight. I was reminded of why I really don’t like to take both children out in public all that often. sigh.

a day (or two) in the life of

Tuesday
6 – up, breakfast, get paper, check email, pack K’s lunch, include pudding
7 – K and T leave
7 – finish breakfast; workout; shower
8 – Rite Aid for free stuff (make sure walk out of house with checkbook for salon)
8:45 – drop E at church
9 – help with Field Day at school
10 – haircut
10:30 – work on nonprofit
12 – pick up E
12:15 – bank
12:30 – lunch; movie/video
2 – snack; unpack K’s backpack from school
2:30 – take children to Target and let them spend their $10 from Grandma
3:30 – play outside
4 – start dinner
5 – dinner
5:30 – play outside/garden
6:30 – bath
7 – pjs/ brush teeth/read
7:30 – bedtime for E/quiet play for K
8 – read to K
8:15 – bedtime for K

Wednesday
6 – up, breakfast, get paper, check email, pack K’s lunch
7 – K and T leave
7 – finish breakfast; shower
7:45 – Harris Teeter w/E
8:45 – back home; unload groceries
9 – PMO
9:30 – Dr. S; take allergist notes
10 – go to Trader Joe’s (pizza crust, organic meats, Jo-Jo’s, OJ)
11 – work on nonprofit
12 – pick up E
12:15 – lunch; movie/video
2 – snack; unpack K’s backpack from school; watch TV
2:30 – play outside
4 – start dinner
5 – dinner
5:30 – play outside/garden
6:15 – leave for dinner with friends
6:30 – bath
7 – pjs/ brush teeth/read
7:30 – bedtime for E/quiet play for K
8 – read to K
8:15 – bedtime for K

93 years old

Yesterday we went to visit my Grandma who is turning 93 on Monday. Some cousins had a big birthday party for her, and 4 of her great-grandchildren were able to be there (my two and the 9-month old twins) as was her 89-year old sister. My grandmother is amazing. She got her drivers license renewed this past week. She just drives into town every now and again to the grocery store. She says she goes at 7:30 in the morning when nobody else is really out. The lady doing her drivers license exam was so impressed with her that she gave her the license for free (normally cost $20 cash in NC), which I thought was really nice. She’s now good ’til she’s 98 as far as driving goes. She laughed when she said that she told them she wouldn’t be back; that this was the last time she was renewing. Grandma is quite remarkable. In addition to living alone, getting dressed up every day and doing all her own cooking, she will also proudly tell you that she has all her own teeth, can see just fine and can hear quite well also. Her mind is completely sane, and she is still a delightful conversationalist. I have some good genes. I hope if I live that long that all my parts work that well, too.

hard at work

I woke up sore this morning but went to bed last night very pleased with what we were able to accomplish yesterday. My cousin is now just trying to stay pregnant for another 2 weeks so she can make it to 28 weeks. We’re hoping that she can start steroid shots then and help the babies’ lungs develop so that whenever the doctors do decide to take them, they will be as strong as possible. The two baby boys are measuring right on schedule; the baby girl’s cord is in the “wrong” place so she is only getting half the blood flow as the other two, so her growth is slowed by that. We don’t have much time to get my cousin’s house in good shape for these new babies to enter the picture. When they arrive, they won’t come home right away, but my cousin and her husband will be spending most of their time at the hospital and won’t have the energy or time to set up a nursery.

So we worked like mad yesterday and will be back at it today. When I arrived we started in the very downstairs (it’s a 3-storey house), where I stay when I come. L (my cousin)’s housekeeper hasn’t been able to come in a month. It’s a sad situation: her father is dying and is in hospice care and she doesn’t have any other siblings and must be with him all the time. So, I cleaned first. I cleaned the bathroom that is down there — the floor, the sink, the toilet. I changed a lightbulb, I put in a wallflower nightlight. Then I started on the wet bar. Mike (L’s husband) likes to work down there late into the night. There were empty beer cans and clothes all over. I cleaned out the sink, recycled the beer cans and wiped down the countertops and the inside of the mini-fridge. I emptied the trashcan and gathered up clothes. Then we moved onto the bedroom down there. We cleaned out the closet and turned it into a “gift center” full of presents to give and wrapping paper and gift bags and tissue paper. Then we raised the one queen bed in the room so I could store a headboard, footboard, and side slats of another queen bed under it. I moved one nightstand out of this room and another into place to be used as the one nightstand in there. We vacuumed all those rooms and then we moved upstairs to the main level.

We started laundry. My aunt had already done a couple of loads, I did four more. I honestly don’t know how long it had been since this family had done laundry. We did a little bit of vacuuming but mostly we started getting baby gifts out of gift bags, “filing” the gift bags and tissue paper, and sorting the gifts into piles: toys, feeding, clothes, diapers/wipes, etc. Then I got all the diapers L already has (I had given her probably 6 packages I got on sale several month ago and she and her mom have been trying to “stock up” ever since she found out she was pregnant) and put them in one place. We put all the preemie diapers upstairs in the nursery. The other diapers we organized by size and put on two shelves in the garage. She has over three dozen boxes and packages of diapers. Then we found all the boxes and bins of baby clothes and a big box of baby toys in the garage and moved all those inside the house. None of the clothes are sorted so that is our project for today. We’re headed to Big Lots to get containers/storage bins. L has a label maker so we’re going to label everything “girl 0-3 months,” “boy 6-9 months,” and we are going to put all the preemie clothes upstairs.

We also cleaned and organized the upstairs bathroom for the children. We put all the shampoo and baby powder and baby wash and lotion in their respective little bins that fit under the sink. She has nearly 2 dozen bottles of all that kind of stuff. We organized the wipes. There are two huge boxes of wipes and at least 2 dozen individual containers or packages of wipes. We stocked three diaper changing areas — one on each floor of the house. Then we put all the diaper rash cream in one bin. I cleaned that bathroom (sink and floor and toilet, but not tub).

We worked a little bit on the nursery. We can’t do much actually inside the room as it only has one coat of paint on it and all the furniture is jumbled up in there. But Mike is going to take the accordian doors off the closet this morning so we can really get everything out of there and organize it today. We have lots of nesting baskets lined with darling blue gingham fabric. One of my loads of laundry last night consisted solely of new baby washclothes and blankets and so forth. I’m hoping to get all those things washed and folded and put into the proper baskets today.

I’m having the time of my life. I love organizing, especially other people’s stuff, houses, lives. I also am getting a pretty good “baby stuff” fix. I don’t really have a baby anymore so it is nice to get to “play” with newborn diapers and the other accessories that come with new babies. L is so much fun to be with and work with. She feels great overall, just gets tired easily, so I just make her sit still and tell me where things are. We are really getting a lot done and enjoying ourselves, too.

away again

Well, I’m off to go help my cousin who is, at T says, “great with children.” which makes it sound like she is good with kids. in fact, she is pregnant with triplets and measuring 43 weeks (for a woman pregnant with one) while being only 25 weeks pregnant. I’m really not going to get much out of this trip personally (usually when I go down to see her and help out, I get to visit old college friends and do some shopping). All my own friends I could go see are out of town or on vacation, so I really am just going down to help her out of the goodness of my heart. I’m just trading my own family chaos for another family’s chaos. It will probably make me appreciate my own family life after going down to be in the midst of hers.

lingering

Yesterday was my monthly scrapbooking gathering. I try to go to this “crop” each month, but in reality I only make it about every other month. I was looking forward to beginning the album of my Grandmother’s life. I had no idea how hard it would be. It never even occurred to me that I would get so emotional. But there I was, painstakingly taking off the photos from those large posterboards my mother had made for Grandmother’s 90th Birthday Party and that we used again at her memorial service, and I just wanted to cry. I went to CVS to make copies of some of the photos on their Picture Maker (fortunately they are running a special this week: buy one 8×10 sheet of prints, get one free — so I made 6 sheets of photos). I’m copying the photos so that my sister and I can have almost identical albums; she’ll get some originals, I’ll get some originals, but we’ll each get every photo we have. I copied a professional color portrait she had done in 1934, shortly after she got married and moved to my hometown. I made a copy of her wedding photo. The house she grew up in, got married in, the out buildings on her father’s property, her two sisters, their family’s first car, a bunch of her friends at camp in the early 1920s, her honeymoon to Atlantic City, all those photos were so much fun to see, but they brought so much emotion with them. It was so hard, looking at those pictures, wanting to call her and ask her about a detail in one of them, wishing I could hear her voice again. I probably only worked on the photos for about 2-3 hours. Then I realized I was Done. Emotionally spent. I will need to be aware of that when I work on this project again. Then again, it may grow easier in time. After all, she has only been dead 16 days as of yesterday.

old is good

I’m typing this post on my laptop while sitting in my Grandmother’s chair. I’m loving having something of hers in my life. There is something really grounding about having old furniture around. I have very few roots in my day-to-day existence. Roots give you wings; you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been (and all that jazz). I like being surrounded by things that belonged to my relatives as opposed to “other people’s furniture” like is found in the furnished parsonages we must inhabit as ministers.

absorbing Grandmother’s things

I took E to PMO at 9 and kept K here with me, instead of letting her start back up at preschool today. She and I had a wonderful morning together. That was, I realized, the first time (at least since we’ve moved) that I have been here with just her while E was gone. Not napping and able to wake up at any second, but gone. Yea! She was great. We played outside some, then worked on her closet and drawers and vacuumed some. She helped me completely clean and straighten E’s room. Then we played with her kitchen and had a ball. Played a game with her as well. In short, we got things done and had a good time and most importantly, we did things just the two of us, which is really part of her problem. She needs the stimulation and she needs the one-on-one attention, not just from anybody, but from me.

T brought E home from PMO, and I nursed him to sleep just in time for my parents to arrive with the furniture I am taking from Grandmother’s nursing home room. It’s a dresser, which we could really use, and then they also brought a lingerie chest from my sister’s childhood room and a chair from Grandmother’s house that was in my old room. I wasn’t sure we had room for everything, but it is working. Our bedroom is almost cluttered as we have to put the treadmill in there for now, but that’s okay. I don’t spend much time in that room. The living room, where I have my office and scrapbooking stuff now has the chair and I’ve got an old timey coffee table in there so I have this very comfortable place to sit, away from the TV and children’s play area in the den, and work on my laptop. yea! I may even turn my desk into my scrapbooking area and fold down one of the card tables in the room to create more floor space. Lots of possibilities. T has now gone back to church for the funeral, my parents are playing with K in her room, and E is still napping. I’m having a good moment!

my id factor

It is only because I am an adult and feel constrained by the bounds of polite behavior (and the fact that I have two small children under foot constantly) that keeps me from running out into the rain and screaming, “nooooooooooooo!!!!!” I am astonished at how powerfully this is affecting me, how profoundly sad I truly am, even when it is “expected” due to her age. I do think some of it is that she has “come back” from so many things — strokes, the brain tumor, etc. I guess I just figured she’d recover from this, too. The last time I saw her she was doing so well, too. She was in her wheelchair, talking and playing with the children, loving seeing them. It was so pleasant and easy and fun. It just seems hard to believe that a month later she’s dead.

now I can process

Today I am allowing myself to do some grieving. I tried very hard to give yesterday over to K and the birthday celebration. Now, I can have some down time and mourn. And collect my thoughts for the memorial service. I’m very sad and overwhelmed when I think I have to go home on Sat. and not go out to the nursing home to see her. God, I’m going to miss that. I can’t just call her on the phone. I can’t believe she’s really gone. I just figured she was going to live forever. 96 years is a hell of a long time. She was born in 1910. TEN! that’s before the first World War. I mean, hell, she could have had memories of that war at one point. She came of age in the roaring 20s — she was a teenage girl during the flapper times. How amazing and cool would that have been?! Anyway, I just miss her so damn much. oh god, why NOW am I thinking of all the things I wanted to ask her? The things I didn’t say. Good lord, I had my whole life to say whatever I wanted to say to her. Why am I consumed with guilt and regret that I didn’t find out one more thing about her life or about our family or about something else?! I’ve spent most of the past few years visiting her with the children, which limited the time I got to talk to her. Not that her mind and voice really was connected to those earlier years any more. She had her mind but she really had forgotten a lot of her earlier life. To be honest, I haven’t been able to ask her about those kinds of things for several years now.

And to be honest, I have asked her plenty. I spent hours collecting memories from her, writing down stories and family trees and names and dates on the backs of photos. I have samples of her handwriting, her voice, her needlework. I have pink and blue afghans and caps that she knit each of my children, long before I ever got married. I have tons of her “stuff” that she already passed down to me when she moved out of her big house when I was in high school. I have plenty. I should have no regrets, but still, there are those little thoughts that crop up, now that she really is gone. I should have … . I wish I had … .

Tomorrow is going to be hard. We have to leave here with two dressed up little kids by 8:30 in the morning, which is earlier than I can even manage on Sundays, and drive two hours to my parents’ house. There is no telling what traffic will be like either. We will go HARD all day. The children will sleep on the way back on Sat. and not go to bed good, and Sunday will be difficult because of that. Sigh. Oh my god, I don’t know how I’ll survive. I’m weepy just thinking about it all.