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@loswhit asked on his blog: Where Did You Grow Up?
We moved here when I was 3 1/2 in 1971, right before my little brother was born.
They paved the road some time around 2000 I think? And my dad had the driveway paved shortly after. They still live there today. About 5 acres of land. The big area to the left of the driveway was the garden. At one point, the “front garden.” It takes a good solid day of mowing with a riding lawnmower.
We never had cable. My parents STILL don’t have cable. In the industry terms, it is a “home not passed.” They’ve been talking about getting satellite for about 5 years now.
Seems like it’s out in the sticks, yes? It’s about 25 miles SE of downtown Atlanta.
I was my Grandma’s only girl and even though I wasn’t the best grand-kid to her, I was very special, and she was very special to me. She had 2 boys, and between them there were 2 grandsons and 1 granddaughter. We gave her 1 great-grandson and 2 great-granddaughters.
The month before my son was born (over 11 years ago), we didn’t think Grandma would be with us much longer. She had Parkinson’s and they hadn’t found a good mix of medication yet for her. She was in a nursing home and not doing well. We took pictures of her with my newborn son with the thought in the back of our head that she at least was able to hold her great-grandson before she died.
But then the right mix was found and she started getting better. She moved into an assisted living home. When my daughter was born we visited her there often. Then a couple of years later, she decided that she was tired of the people there and tired of having everyone trying to know everyone’s business, and moved back to her house.
Last year they found that Grandma was developing fibroids in her lungs. No cure, only treatment for symptoms. She was using a nebulizer with breathing treatments until a month or so ago and she moved to oxygen. The last few weeks she has been on oxygen full time.
Sunday, we were all down at my parents’ for my Mom’s and my daughter’s birthdays — Grandma’s birthday was in August too, but she wasn’t feeling up to coming over. So we all went down to her house and spent about an hour with her.
Grandma passed away yesterday afternoon. I love her so much, and I know she loved me just as much if not more.
She was the typical grandma — she let you do all the cool things parents aren’t allowed to — one time she took me to Tastee Freeze (the only restaraunt in town) to get me a milkshake. I wanted the large one. She asked once if I was sure that I wanted that much, and I assured her, oh yes. So she bought it for me knowing I’d get such a bellyache. And instead of saying “I told you so” took care of me and my silly belly.
Here’s a picture of her at our family vacation in 2006 with her 3 great-grandchildren. She loved the beach and loved Florida. She and my Grandpa almost moved down there when I was still in high school, but they could never decide on a good place to stay.
I will miss you Grandma, but I’m so glad that you don’t have to struggle for every breath, or have to rest just from walking to the next room.
She just sees the world in such a different way, that I’m constantly amazed by what she says and the thoughts that come out of that not-so-little noggin of hers.
I had just bought a refill of my allergy maintenance medicine and I was opening the bottle in the car. Buddy asks, “Why do they have so many different seals and plastic and tops and cotton on medicine bottles?” And so we try to explain to them what happened with the Tylenol scare in 1982 (I had to look that up) and how the solution was to make sure if someone got into a product to change it, you would know.
Both kids then had a few questions about him*: where did it happen? how many people died? will it happen again? etc… I told them I was pretty sure he was never caught (he wasn’t) and they then asked me where I thought he was now. I told them it was quite a while ago, and that he might even be dead by now.
Sweetie then piped up from the backseat, “Or…. maybe he retired from being evil.”
Oh heavens, I love that little girl and her left-handed angle of the world!
After we were sure the car was going to stay in the lane and not run off the road from us laughing, we heard Buddy tell her in his oh-so-11-and-wise voice, “No. Once you go evil you can’t go back.”
Which was a whole other conversation. Jeez Louise, kids ask the hard questions or bring up the touchy subjects as easy as they do asking “what’s for lunch?” White House Press Correspondents have nothing on two kids sitting in the backseat of a car.
* I use the male pronoun for someone that was never identified or caught not to be sexist or whatever – I’m just lazy and don’t want to say he/she, etc. everytime.
My little girl looks at the world in her unique, left-handed way. Here is a few examples, and I”ll try to add more as we remember them:
Last night while we were eating dinner she said: “You know, your eyes are like little mirrors that only show what’s around you and you can’t see yourself…except what’s on your body. But I can’t see my back, and that’s part of my body. Momma, can you see your back when you grow up?”
Your pants… you know… two legs, button and zipper… well Sweetie calls the legs “pants sleeves.”
Her pillow cases are “pillow sheets.”
Baseball is starting up. Softball schedules are being emailed out. The kids are losing teeth on such a regular basis that the Tooth Fairy may rent out the spare room (Buddy is starting his molars, Sweetie is moving to remainder of front teeth). Twee’s top came down last Sunday for a wonderful sunny ride about town. Yep. Spring is in the air — and in my sinus cavity.
Buddy, Sweetie and I hit some balls on Sunday, but they only had baseball. They both hit 40mph, and did ok, considering they’ve only been twice, and I hit 40 and 50mph, and did ok, considering I’ve never played fast pitch in my life. The 60mph button was dark, and I chickened out going for 70mph. Maybe next time. And, I hit with my 30 ounce softball bat, so yay me!
I’ve got my Women’s C Team schedule up as well as my Atlanta Ad League schedule, although until we get all the interested teams in and the league drawn up, I won’t know opponents or times until later. I hope we can bounce back from the sad short season we had this past fall.
I’ve changed my desktop picture to a more seasonal theme. This great blog I’ve just found – Shorpy - has some incredible high definition pictures. Just amazing stuff. I think I’m getting the mlb.com package for my birthday, so I’m really getting into the baseball frame of mind.
And on a totally unrelated to the rest of this post, we surprised the kids and took them to the circus 2 weekends ago. Through pulled strings of our CRO’s exec admin Kim B. (rock on, Kim!) we got seats in the VIP Suite our company owns. It was a nice surprise for them, and 2 bags of cotton candy (with 2 hats), 2 souvenir sports bottles of lemonade, and 1 spinny toy later, we were $62 poorer (yes!), but a happy family.
We finally were able to get our yearly visit with Santa. Whew! Right now I only have 4 years of Santa pictures on my flickr site, but I hope to update with all 9 of them.
I think there are 9, I know we had one year that Buddy was NOT interested in seeing Santa. Nope, nu-uh… until 2pm on Christmas Eve. We got to the mall and counted the number of families in line, did the “well each person takes about 3 min’s” calculation and realized we’d get to the front of the line JUST as Santa took his hour break. And by then we’d be late for Christmas dinner at my family’s. He was able to get his attention and wave to him, but no picture.
In 2003 or 2004 Sweetie had no interest in seeing him and started crying just as we got to Santa. We tried to get her to sit with him, but no dice. So Santa (we’ve had the same Santa for at least 5 years) told her “oh, no I have something I forgot to do here in the back” and walked behind the stage while we put her and Buddy in the huge chair. Then once she had calmed down, he snuck back in for the picture. It may be my favorite one! Although they are all awesome!
After much apathy, whining, and dragging of the feet (excuse the pun), Sweetie – my darling little left-hander in a family full of right-handers – finally learned to tie her shoes!
Woo!
I was told this would make a good topic to blog about (by Sweetie herself, of course), so I got the camera out and documented the process over the Thanksgiving weekend. Already just a week later, she’s gotten much better and will be a pro in no time.
While Dylan and Ann were here last week, we took a trip to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. They had 2 exhibits we were really interested in: The Louvre and Annie Leibovitz. We hit the Louvre exhibit first and it had an audio tour. Knowing now, we should have gone there last, because the audio tour kept the kids enthralled. At one point we were moving on to another part and Sweetie yelled (since she had on the headphones) “But I’m not DONE yet!” and everyone around got a great chuckle of that.
This exhibit was good, but I absolutely loved the Annie Leibovitz exhibit. I was the last of the group out, and could have stayed another hour. She had a lot of photos from her times with Susan Sontag, and I enjoyed reading her comments throughout.
Sweetie had another minor meltdown yesterday morning regarding teeth. This time, it was the top tooth and it was so loose she couldn’t chew. Which led to the breakfast breakdown – and she promptly asked for waffles. Which led to another breakdown when I tried to explain those wouldn’t be any better.
So she started up a video game and I started up LOTRO, and suddenly she rushes over “Momma! I lost ANOTHER TOOTH!” as though we didn’t all know it was incredibly loose, but a miracle that it suddenly was out. This one didn’t bleed at all, which made it even better.
We placed the tooth in the official tooth box:
… and forgot about it until later that evening. We were driving to Sweetie’s favorite restaurant “Bacado” (not to celebrate the tooth, just because we were craving mexican). We started going there when she was a tiny baby, and when she started eating solids, we would order her sliced avocado — and that became the name of the restaurant. As in: “I want to eat Bacado!”
She was talking with Buddy about something in the back seat, and I started to giggle. She had just said something like, “… and basthically that persthon wasth sthoooo tired!” It was so adorable I said, “Hey, you haven’t called Grammy and Poppa yet!” So she called and told Grammy all about it and how “it didn’t bleed A BIT!” and Grammy got to hear the lispy-ness of 1 less tooth.
We jump in both cars, drive down to Marietta Square, and drop one of the cars off in a prime “fireworks display” parking spot. We then go about our business until about 8pm, when we head back to the square and park the other car as close as we can get, but not too close. We mosey on back to car 1, watch the fireworks, and then go to The Marietta Diner for a late dinner, and finally pick up the car left behind and head home.
This year we started out a little later than in the past — about 3:30p. We were going by a small public lot and I saw someone leaving — jumped into the lot for the last place — even got to back in — score! As we were leaving we talked about how that might not be a good watching spot, but the chairs were in the back of car 1, so we could always adjust.
Late lunch was at Sonny’s bbq, and then a trip to the dollar store for another tradition… glowing stuff. For $7 we got 8 necklaces, 8 bracelets, and 3 10″ wands.
We decided to head back home for a bit, and EGlenn took an hour nap — Sweetie wouldn’t bite though. We started back to the square a little late — 8:15pm, so by the time we got there, it was packed. EGlenn dropped us off and started looking for a spot.
We broke out the chairs and the glow sticks:
It started getting dark, and still no EGlenn… I was just about to tell him to come by and switch places with me, when he called to say he found a spot.
While he walked back to us, we played with the light sticks… which HAVE to (have to!) become light sabers at one point. Red obviously being the evil one, we all took turns being bad.
Behind the back block:
Blur of color as it got darker:
EGlenn timed it just right and had just enough time to get settled into his chair. We talked briefly about which way we might move if the trees were in our way. Then they started… RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM US! We were so close, the trees didn’t come into play at all. It felt like the fireworks were right on top of us, it was so awesome! Buddy mentioned that we were so close you could SMELL the fireworks, and sometimes the smell was quite strong. Only one went off early, but it still got about tree high, so not too scary.
We then went off to the Marietta Diner for a late supper (Buddy and EGlenn had dinner, Sweetie and I had breakfast) then back for EGlenn’s car, getting home around 12:30am.
Was a great time!
