grandparents

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Wild roses, cleaning out pools, and looking for crayfish

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Welcome to my corner of the internet for a Saturday afternoon chat.

Can I pour you a cup of tea or coffee? Maybe a glass of juice or just plain water?

I was out of honey all week this past week which meant I had to sweeten my tea with sugar. Yuck! It was awful.

I was so thankful to The Husband for picking me up some local honey yesterday I made myself a cup of tea even though it was humid and sticky.

Last Sunday we spent the day at my parents for Father’s Day where we helped my dad clean out the pool to try to get it ready for Little Miss and me to swim in for a couple of months this summer.

We were supposed to go back and help again this week, but Dad was either busy or the weather wasn’t great or, well, I completely forgot. This next week we will help again and hopefully, the pool will be ready soon.

Dad bought a robot to clean the inside of the pool. You start it up and lower it in the pool and the idea is that it rolls around the bottom and picks up all the dirt, leaves, and other messy stuff.

Dad decided he was going to name the robot Stella as a bit of a joke because he kept forgetting the name of the therapist that helps during his therapy boxing class. He dropped her in at one point and came back in the house and I went out to get a shirt from the car I wanted to change into before I started skimming the pool. When I started to the car, though, he told me I had to hurry and help him find Stella.

“Our pool is so dirty, she’s probably full already. Hurry and help me find her because she has the pool so stirred up, I can’t see anything and she might burn her motor out.”

So, The Husband and I ran to help. My way of helping was to yell “Stella! Stella!” like I was Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire while my dad and husband searched for the robot and eventually found her. They used the end of a cane to scoop her out because the hook she came with hadn’t been put together yet.

Later in the afternoon we went inside and searched for photographs of my grandfather to use for a video that I want to pair with audio we have of him singing at a fairground near us. I had already made one video for my dad, which I shared on here last week, but I had another song and wanted to add more photos since that was the original plan for the other video.

The audio was transferred, I think, from a reel-to-reel years ago.

While looking through the photos, we found photos of my grandparents when they were young, my grandfather singing, my grandparents on their 55th wedding anniversary, my grandfather with his arm around some Hawaiian girls when he and Grandma visited Hawaii, and him with his cousin when they were young boys. The Boy looked at the photo of him hugging the Hawaiian girls with wide eyes but I explained that visitors are greeted when they arrive by young ladies and gentlemen with leis to hang over the necks of the visitors.

After we left my dad found a pile of photos of him singing and acting at community events.

If you haven’t guessed already from my writing that I have audio of my grandfather singing, he was a well-known local singer who performed for local community and fundraising events. We also have a recording of him singing at a local television station but for some reason, we only have the audio and not the video.

I know I mentioned last week that I never had the opportunity to get to know my grandfather because he died when I was 2. I only know him through stories, his poems (of which we have tons), his journals (which mainly consisted of him writing about the weather and the errands he ran that day so nothing super personal), and photographs.

On Tuesday Little Miss was able to meet with a friend who she normally only talks to online (through a kid-safe video chat). The girl’s family came to town for a dentist appointment for her dad, and we met them by the soccer field behind the dentist’s office. After the appointment, I took Little Miss and her friend to a local restaurant for ice cream. Then they explored the tiny stream that runs by the restaurant. Little Miss was looking for crayfish – which I learned this week many of you refer to as crawdads.  We didn’t have a net to catch one and she was afraid it would pinch her when she tried to pick it up so we are going to get a net soon and take her to a creek where she can catch one.

I wandered out into our yard later that day to photograph our roses because I know they will be gone soon. I miss it so much when our roses are gone. I miss the flowers and really need to take some lessons from my neighbor on how to grow them because she has beautiful flowers all summer long.

On Wednesday Little Miss had a short Summer Reading program at the local library (a book read and a craft) and The Boy went to a sleepover and birthday party for a friend.

On Thursday, The Husband took Little Miss to gymnastics and I watched a special with James Cameron on the 25th anniversary of the Titanic movie. I’m going to write a separate blog post about that one because – I have issues with it. Ha!

Yesterday I spent most of the day doing what I did Thursday which was washing dishes and doing laundry but not actually getting to the folding of the laundry. Ahem. But I did get it washed at least. On Wednesday I even hung laundry out on our clothesline, which I don’t know if I will do again because it was all stiff when I took it off for some reason.

Yesterday was very, very humid and rainy and today was supposed to be more of the same, but so far it feels much better. I am a fan of rain when it is cold out, not when it is all sticky and gross and makes my head feel icky.

Little Miss is having some friends over today and a planned sleepover with them, which will be her first time having a sleepover. Well, second, but we had to take her friend home in the middle of the night that first time. This time she is having two friends over so hopefully it goes better.

We are supposed to have rain for the next week, which will be great for the farmers and the ground, but will sort of stink because The Husband has the whole week off from work and we were going to go to a local state park which also features a lake we can swim in, but it looks like we might not be able to do that because of the rain.

How was your week last week? Do anything interesting? Let me know in the comments and tell me if you’ve found any good teas to try. I’ve written down a few of your suggestions and have been adding them to my shopping lists to try in the future.

The weekend I learned people of ‘a certain age’ don’t actually sleep

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

Apparently, once you hit 70 or so, you don’t sleep. At least that’s what I’ve learned after spending two nights and three days with my parents this past weekend.

I really thought that older people slept a lot – or at least napped – sort of like cats, but, alas, that is obviously not the case.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that aches and pains and heartburn and simple, general old-age insomnia keep many older people awake, so that’s why they don’t sleep. I’m already experiencing it at middle-age. Still, I had no idea that people of a “certain age” only need about five hours of sleep to function each day. They may not function well, and they may function on a bit more of a cranky plane than others, but they function nonetheless.

My daughter wanted to stay at her grandparents one weekend and since we couldn’t that particular day, I told her we would do it the following weekend when her brother was at a sleepover and her dad was working an extra shift. As so often happens when I plan a special weekend, I ended up having two weird health spells while there (translation: I’m hitting that special age when our hormones shift so my nasty monthly visitor came early), which wasn’t fun, but what was fun was watching my daughter spend almost our entire time there sitting next to her grandmother playing with her stuffed animals and telling my mom all she knows  about wildlife thanks to PBS kids’ Wild Kratts. Of course, she did tell Mom that some Jaguares give birth to 300 cubs at a time, obviously not accurate, so I think she may have misunderstood something Chris and Martin told her.

I don’t have a strict bedtime for my children most nights and since this was a sleepover we went to bed late that night. I crawled into my aunt’s old room around 11:30 and since Little Miss hadn’t had a nap all day she passed out within five minutes. I started to drift off at midnight while reading a book.

Before bed I had tried to figure out how to turn off the lamp next to the bed and before I even reached it, it turned off, which made me realize it must be a touch lamp. I decided I must have touched it right and went to bed, only to have the thing turn on a few moments later without me even touching it. That was disconcerting so I found the actual switch and turned that to make sure the light stayed off. I could just imagine my late aunt up in Heaven, if she can see from there, laughing at me until she couldn’t breathe. Back in bed I curled up in the flannel sheets and tried to relax after a weird day of dizziness and high blood pressure (as mentioned before, this turned out to be related to my early visitor, but I didn’t know that at the time so my hypochondria had kicked in. The blood pressure went back into normal range the next few days.).

I closed my eyes and ten minutes later a light filled the room as if the stadium lights at a night football game had been turned on. Zooma the Wonderdog had curled up at my feet, but, of course, when she heard footsteps in the hallway she was off the bed to investigate. I figured Dad had to use the bathroom while Mom was in the one downstairs so I waited for the light to click back off again. It did, but then bam! It was on 30 seconds later. I decided I’d have to join the dog to investigate so I headed down the stairs only to meet my dad, brushing his teeth, coming up to meet me.

“I turned the light off but then I thought I’d better turn it back on because I didn’t know if the dog could find her way back to your room in the dark,” he told me.

“Dad, she’s a dog. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

I flipped the light back off and went back to bed. It was about 1 a.m.

At 6 a.m. I woke up to use the bathroom and could already hear my dad opening and closing the front door and calling for Zooma to come back inside from her morning potty break. I’d had a long day the day before so I crawled back into bed and a few hours later I staggered downstairs to find my parents somewhat wide awake and freshly baked fish on the counter for breakfast (we aren’t really breakfast-food people.)

“Good grief, don’t you two sleep?” I asked.

“What? I was up at 5:30…” Dad told me.

“Yeah, but you didn’t go to bed until 1,” I pointed out.

He shrugged.

I imagined he would catch up on his sleep the next night. Instead, I was again woke up at 6 a.m., the next morning, after going to bed too late again, this time by Zooma jumping on the bed and a bright, artificial light filling the room. Apparently, Dad still didn’t think Zooma could find her way back after her morning potty break.

The last night we were there, my 4-year old daughter and 12-year old son were eating tomato soup with their grandfather at 10:30 at night.

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I was glad it was only soup this time.

One other time we were stranded at their house in a snowstorm when my mom began shoving several pieces of chocolate into my then 3-year old daughter around 11:30 at night. Fine, maybe Mom wasn’t shoving them in, but simply opening them one-by-one so my daughter could shove them in. We were awake until at least 1 a.m. the next morning. When I discovered the empty wrappers, I asked my mom what she was thinking and she giggled and said “I don’t know! She was just so cute!”

I swear when people hit grandparent age they forget about all those rules they had when they were parents. I can’t imagine my parents ever letting me shove candy down my gullet that late at night, or even being awake that late at night.

And also when they hit grandparent age, they apparently, forget how nice sleep can be.