Grand grands…

Feeding ducks and fish

Watching cartoons

We visited a different park every other day

Tickles

Watching swim lessons

A banana bread baking contest between mom and Grammi

Dinosaurs and trains

Origami straw rockets

Walks to the store

Noisy meals

Little boys arguing

Covid…. sigh…

Lunch at a really cool Soba restaurant

Helping address and stamp my daughters New Years cards

A snot tsunami after a sneeze

Two boys howling like wolves

Bey blades crazy

Walks to the post box

Veggie Tales Silly Songs with Larry

Quiet mornings for prayer before the family wakes

Reading a great book

Being buried in stuffed animals

Watching cooking shows with our daughter and son (in-law) after after the boys bedtime

A weekend road trip to the place my father served in the Navy

A Japanese dollar store trip

Coffee… lots of coffee. Almost daily trips to a coffee shop.

Tiny and huge hotel rooms

Smallest elevator I have ever seen

Word of the day: Magnificent

Random outbursts into song and dance during meals

“I’m hungrier than a peacock eating snacks”

Pokémon chip cards

Waking to two 4.4 earthquakes, that I originally thought were my cats scratching themselves on my bed.

Walking past the guard cat, seriously, with a pillow for a shield.

Gift giving and receiving.

Extravagant hospitality.

Aunts, uncles, cousins grandparents and great grandparents

Blowing bubbles

My father explaining crossword puzzles to his great grandsons

Wind and Sun

Used Kimono shopping with my daughter

Goodbye tears leaving them

Happy tears to see my honey again

Busy times…

Over the past month, we have committed to hosting a wedding in August, a Bar Mitzvah in September, a wedding in October, and a ten year anniversary wedding reception in our barn.

I babysat a friend’s three kids for a few days, during which I got very little done besides cooking and keeping the house somewhat clean. I dealt with a sprinkler station that had a major leak due to voles (underground field mice) eating holes in the plastic piping, leaking backflow assemblies, a rabbit in the garden, a squirrel on our patio, bored tween/teen grandkids, the family dynamics between my son and his ex-wife.

I have had to start files for all the events we are hosting, and figure out how to shore up a weak pergola for the wedding. Tomorrow I have to get the wood for that project and get it stained for the workers who arrive on the 18th. Hopefully it is ready to use by the 24th, when we are hosting an outdoor bridal shower.

I have flowers to plant. A garden fence to finish putting up, raised beds to move into the garden space, and an irrigation system to design and install.

My freeze dryer gave me a vacuum pump error message, so I spent part of today going through their troubleshooting process. After I think I got it working again, I installed a software update. We’ll see how it works tomorrow when I put a batch in.

My honey needs a ride to his specialty chiropractor and hour away, and somewhere along the way, I would like to spend a few minutes making some 3 dimensional flowers for the wall in my office. We have 10’ ceilings, which make rooms look bigger, but can also lead to a lot of bare spaces.

The list is never ending. What doesn’t get done today, will be forwarded to tomorrow’s to do list. Someday, maybe I’ll finish. Probably not, but, hey, hope is good for the soul! I have to Lear. To carve out time for fun things, for building relationships with other women, with my grands, with my Creator. May today be one step closer in your life to finding Balance.

He’s sloshed…

Sloshed. That word should date me. When I was a teen in the early 80’s (yikes!) that word meant drunk. I’m not sure what the word for that is today, but it’s probably not the same.

The he in the title is referring to Waldo, our biggest cat. Although he is over twenty pounds at this point, he is still very much the kitten at only a year and a half. Waldo has a fascination with water. Not a negative, I have rabies type fascination, but the “I have to see it move” type fascination.

It started out the first time he noticed the water in the humidifier tank bubble. He would sit for hours watching and waiting for it to bubble. Then he would bat at it, peer around and through it trying to figure it out. After that, he moved to the water dish. Oy vey! When the cats were younger, they would often wrestle around their water dish in our bathroom, frequently sloshing the water all over the floor. The solution to a wet floor was to move the plastic container into the wall in shower. If it got knocked, the water was contained in a made for wet spot.

Fast forward to the present. Once Waldo got bored with the humidifier, he began to deliberately move their water dish around in the shower to get the water to move. That quickly turned to aggressive moving of the water dish so the water would slosh out of the dish and onto the pebble textured shower floor, where he would try to keep it from getting down the drain. Now, although our floors are dry, they have cute, large cat ow tracks from the shower to the bedroom.

Whenever I see him in the shower playing with the water, sloshing it about, I think it’s funny to tell people that my cat likes to get sloshed. Now, you may, or may not appreciate my attempt at humor, but hopefully this has pinged a picture in your mind that will make you giggle or at the very least smile whenever you hear the word sloshed, or see a cat in a shower or a water dish.

The Wilds…

To our cats, Statler and Waldo, “changing the bed sheets” day is their favorite day of the week. It means it’s the day before Sabbath, and it means The Wilds.

For anyone who has never tried to change the sheets on a bed with cats around; please allow me to enlighten you. The Wilds is kinda what it sounds like. The comforter gets pulled off the bed and suddenly there are two cats on my bed. One fitted corner is pulled back and a cat jumps under the sheet. The other jumps on the cat under the sheet. I leave the room.

When I return to what appears to be an empty room, I finish pulling the fitted sheet off. By the time I start trying to tuck in the second corner of the new fitted sheet, Statler has appeared and taken a full speed, running slide into the corner I am tucking in. After having one of his nails stuck into my thumb, I learned to be extremely careful. Again. I leave the room.

Sneaking in one more time to try to finish the job, as the sound of the flat sheet being opened begins, they both appear again! Sliding, jumping and wrestling in, on and under the sheet. I leave the room again.

If I wait long enough to finish up, the Wilds have dissipated and they have fallen asleep somewhere out of reach of the sound of sheets and I am able to finish the job.

This is why it can take all day to change one bed’s linens. Why don’t I lock them out to get it done quickly? Oh my goodness! It is so much fun to watch them play, and it tries them out. I think it is therapeutic for me to laugh like that when I watch. I hope you have something to enjoy each day, even if it means taking longer to accomplish something.

A Tale of Two Kitties…

I often marvel at how two people or cats can come from the same parents and yet are so magnificently different.

Take, for example our two cats who just turned one. Statler is all black, a little overweight, stealthy, hunts his toys like prey. Waldo is a grey tiger, a lean mean fighting machine, a bit clumsy, and is all about playtime.

Statler gently and elegantly slinks from a standing position to a full out stretch and lay down. Waldo flops.

Statler will scratch on anything and everything, vertical (upholstered chair backs, mattress sides) and horizontal (wall to wall carpet, and area rugs). Can you hear me screaming on the inside? Waldo will only scratch on the scratching post they have had since kittenhood. I hope when I have to re-twine it, he will continue this wonderful habit and not pick up his brothers bad habit.

They are also different when it comes to eating. If I put a piece of chicken on the floor for each of them, Statler goes right at it, while Waldo takes his time. If Statler finishes first, he will often be the pig and go over and take whatever is left from Waldo. Waldo doesn’t put up a fight at all. BUT, on the rare occasion the tables turn, all “you know what” can erupt if Waldo is caught even glancing towards Statler’s treat. The growling will usually keep Waldo at bay. Phew!

Statler used to be aggressive in looking for attention, often weaving between our legs while we walked, jumping into my empty lap whenever I sat down. That has changed, and he is more content now to be independent. Waldo on the other hand won’t jump into a lap. He will wander a room kinda whining. He enjoys leading you to his scratching post in the master bedroom and flopping down for you to pet his tummy.

Statler has never waken me in the middle of the night. Waldo often walks the length of my body, on it, from my knees to my chest, just to sniff my face. Presumably checking to see if I am awake and want to play. This morning at 4:30, he actually brought his mon descript black rat toy (as I call it) up onto the bed to play with, hoping to engage me. I took it and hid it under the covers. He left me alone, but it’s always hard to get back to real sleep after that.

I do realize that all this will evolve over time, as does human behavior. For now, I really enjoy their differences. Over my lifetime, I have often thanked Yahuah/Yahweh/Yehovah, the God of the Bible for making this world such a beautiful place. For all the colors, instead of black and white. For the different physical and personality traits of people. It would be boring if we all looked or acted the same. I hope this inspires you to look around, and appreciate the differences in mankind, and this amazing earth we call home and everything on it. And, if I have made you giggle, then I have been successful. Hope you have an awesome day!

Being home…

Today and tomorrow I am babysitting a friend’s three kids. It has been a long time since I haven’t worked at the property all day or been out running errands for the building project. I forgot how much I love being home and being a homemaker.

My day started at 11:55pm last night. I had been asleep for about an hour when I heard the dreaded smoke detector chirp. It startled me awake sending me into fight or flight. I crawled out of bed and met up with my honey in the hallway while trying to figure out which detector was chirping. Of course, it has to be the one at the peak of the vaulted ceiling. My honey put on some slippers, grabbed the key to our shed and headed out the back door to get the ladder. We removed the detector, then the battery and headed back to bed. Sleep tried to elude me as I laid in the dark, wondering how we would change the detector batteries at our new home, with a vault considerably higher than the one here. After a couple games of solitaire on my little handheld game, I was able to fall asleep. The sugar and gluten I had eaten woke me at 4:30. I used the toilet, crawled back into bed and gave the cat a minute of attention before drifting back to sleep.

After waking again at 5:30, I decided to give up on getting more sleep. I knew my alarm would be going off soon. I needed to eat breakfast, feed the cat, do my morning chores, bring the papers in and read the funnies before 7:00am. The van windows would take about five minutes to clear of frost enough to drive to the property by 7:15. There I would load up three windows, take them into town to get them tinted for the fake gables, pick up our two older grands at their mom’s work, and get back to my house by 9:00am to be home for when a friend was going to drop off her three younger kids for a couple days. This would be the first time they could be without kids in a couple years.

The rest of the day was filled with prepping lunch for everyone before hearing “When’s lunch?” “I’m hungry!” Same for snacks. My 12 year old granddaughter and I prepped a batch of chicken enchilada soup together, for them to take home. They are moving closer to us this week, and I know how hard it can be to plan meals and cook when you are packing and moving. The soup, and another meal were instant pot ready, which I knew she/mom would be keeping out. There were some minor altercations to deal with, a few hurt feelings also, but the laughter and squeals of joy far outnumbered the unpleasantries. Our grands and the three other kids finally found a play rhythm and fun ensued.

Dinner was prepped by snack time, and I felt relaxed and content, noise and all. I had forgotten how much I love being a housewife/mom/grandma. I get great pleasure from happy children noises, meals ready when hunger sets in, reading bedtime stories with funny voices, hugging and comforting a child whose feelings got hurt. I love being home.

My mom used to tell me I was born in the wrong century. I should have been born in the Little House on the Prairie days. I would have loved that life. I often find myself trying to recreate the simplicity of that lifestyle. Being a mom who raises kids to be responsible, loving, hard working human beings. Cooking and preserving. It suits me. It may not suit everyone, but I find myself in it. And life is best when we find our lane, and stay in it, instead of trying to be what others think we should be.

With the new year upon us, if you are doing any introspection or resolutions, I hope you will find or decide what you are best at, and resolve to stay in your lane, regardless of the peer pressure to do contrary. And, may you find great joy and contentment in doing so.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ahhhh…

Hugs and hellos. A month of giggles, whines and tickles. Bedtime bottles, early morning conversation over the necessary cup of coffee. Special Grammi breakfasts of coffee cake, Dutch babies, and croissants with lemon blueberry cream cheese spread. Exasperations, exuberations, tired eyes, lack of sleep. Squeals of delight, cries of “I want!”. Love tanks filled to overflowing. Spoiling a grown daughter. Spoiling her kids. Selfies, sprinklers in the sandbox, walking to the park. Dinners out, days at the beach, shopping. Doing touristy things in the town we live in. Falling behind with the garden, barely staying on track with the building. A long drive with pleasant conversation. Memories remembered, new ones made. Pictures taken, funny faces, family and lifelong friends. Goodbye hugs, lots of tears, the wave goodbye, as they disappeared into the airport masses. Deep breaths, sighs and smiles. Still tired, catching up, cleaning up, naps. Smiles when remembering. Sad but happy at the same time.