Hi everyone,
I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy.
My current desktop photo is that little star of my show, Andrew.
I got to spend a few hours with him this past week and I could fill a whole letter with just his cuteness. And I may yet.
Sometimes I don’t really know what I’m going to write about, then I sit down to write and end up filling lots of pages.
Sometimes I do know what I want to write about and end up writing about something altogether different!
And today is combination of both. I have a few things I want to talk about, so let’s get them out of the way and I’ll tell you about this photo. Wait. Let’s reverse that. I’ll tell you about the photo that is my desktop, then I’ll cover the other topics, then, if there’s room, I’ll regale you with Andrew stories. How does that sound?
My desktop photo shall be called Independent Andrew...
You know, I think Andrew has the perfect parents. I think they will be able to channel his willfulness without killing his spirit. Andrew is smart and Andrew is headstrong and always has been. Babies want to be cuddled. Not Andrew. Since the day he was born he wanted to face out, face the world. If you tried to hold him face in, he would scrooch and squirm until he got turned around.
“You’re going to have your hands full with this one,” I told Kevin and Kandyce. I’ve never seen a baby that didn’t want to be cuddled.
And babies want to be swaddled. Not Andrew. “Only for a little while after he was born did he let us cover him. Since then he doesn’t want a blanket on him at all and if we cover him after he’s asleep, he’ll kick it off,” Kevin told me.
Andrew certainly knows his own mind. He knows what he wants and he knows what he doesn’t want. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like.
This past Sunday Pop-pop and I got to spend a few hours with him while the kids were busy.
“Andrew. Do you want to go for a walk?” I asked.
I don’t remember what he was doing at the time but he dropped everything and brought my shoes to me and set them at my feet then he went for his sandals, all without being asked. Then he asked me to put his shoes on him.
“Wait,” I told him. “I want to take a picture.”
Andrew waited. He is so good for us and just look at how neatly he placed our shoes!
We got our shoes on and harnessed up Itsy and Ginger, said good-bye to Pop-pop and out we went. I didn’t have the stroller so Andrew would have to do all of the walking. I planned just a short trip around the block for us and in a completely different direction than the way we normally go. I had Andrew hold my hand as we crossed Bagnell Dam Boulevard and once on the other side he released my hand and we headed down the hill.
This road used to be blacktop, but parts of it are gone now and they are using dirt and gravel to keep it passable. Do you know what you get when you combine gravel, blacktop and incline?
Yeah, a slip hazard.
I’m always careful where I place my feet but Andrew didn’t have any experience in this department and after falling twice, he let me hold his hand. I kept him from going the whole way down at least twice more. Then we were at the bottom of the hill.
I wasn’t worried about meeting a car on this road because it belongs to Iguana, a boat sales and rental business, and we were walking on their road after business hours. So I let Andrew walk by himself.
I heard a critter skittering through the underbrush and caught a glimpse of a whistle pig heading for his burrow. He didn’t go the whole way in and I was able to catch this shot of him through the leaves.
Andrew is walking Ginger and I’m carrying Itsy and we get about halfway around the loop when I see a gold finch. With their bright yellow plumage I think they are a pretty bird and I start to take a bunch of shots of him. He doesn’t really go very far and I follow him and end up taking forty-nine shots of him.
I’m a mother. Although I am taking photos I am aware of where Andrew is and what he’s doing. Someplace along the line Andrew gets tired of waiting for me.
“Andrew, where ya’ goin’?” I asked.
He keeps walking.
“Andrew, come back here,” I tell him.
And I hear a tiny little, “no,” and he shakes his head.
“Where ya’ goin’?” I asked again, but I didn’t have to, I knew where he was going. He was going home. And there is little doubt in my mind that if I would have let him, he would have gone, unerringly, home. Back the way we had come.
“Andrew, we’re going home,” I told him, “but let’s go this way.”
“No,” came a little peep.
“Andrew! It’s a circle!” I told him and made big sweeping motions with my arm. “We’re going home, we’re just going this way!”
There was little hope that I was going to change the mind of Independent Andrew once he had it made up and I was on the verge of going after him when we heard a car.
The sound barely registered with me, I knew where it was and I knew it wasn’t coming our way. It was going into the parking lot at the boat rental place. However, when I saw Andrew stop and listen, I knew I could use this to get him to do what I wanted him to do. When dealing with a determined youngster, a parent sometimes has to pull a tool from their bag of tricks and I wasn’t above using fear.
Andrew looked back at me. “There’s a car, you better come here!” And lickety-split, he came running like his tail was on fire.
Do you think I should I feel guilty?
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Something you may or may not know about me is that I have gall bladder issues. I haven’t had an attack worth mentioning since Mike and I were in Yuma, Arizona four or five or maybe even six years ago now. Who knows? I totally can not keep track of time. I know it has been a really long time though, and I know I wrote about it at the time cause I was in bed for a couple of days with that one.
Most of the time, for me, an attack is triggered because I eat too much butter, so I try to be careful, and now, trying to watch my weight, I’m not eating much butter at all these days. But something else that will send me into an attack is oil. Not nearly as often as butter but twenty-five years ago, when I first started having attacks, French fries would cause me agony.
I seldom throw up, and I hate to throw up and even if I want to throw up because I know it will make me feel better, I don’t have any success making myself throw up -- no matter how far I shove my finger down my throat. It just makes me retch -- you know, dry heaves.
Monday night Mike and I went to a local place for twenty-five cent wings. I am not much for wings so I ordered fish and chips. A couple of hours later my stomach starts to feel uncomfortable and I knew it was my gall bladder. I tried to head it off with Pepto-Bismol which most of the time works for me, but this time it didn’t. Long about one in the morning I got a really good look at the inside of my toilet.
There I am, retching my guts out, thinking, “Hmm, I need to clean under the rim.”
I did end up vomiting that night and I’m tempted to describe it to you here, but on second thought, you probably don’t need to know that it was a viscous brown mass with no chunks and more surprisingly to me, no pink stuff either. Oh, wait. I said I wasn’t going to tell you that. Forgive me please?
I really was surprised there wasn’t any Pepto in it because I think I downed about half a bottle through the course of the evening. Which, by the way (just in case you didn’t know) will turn your poopy black for the next couple of days.
I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking, “It’s just amazing the things that Peggy knows!”
That’s not what you were thinking?
Vomiting isn’t nearly as bad as retching. I don’t know why my body objects so hard to holding onto something that clearly wasn’t good for me in the first place. Am I alone in this or do others have a hard time vomiting?
Tuesday I pulled on my disposable gloves and gave my toilet a good scrubbing. I gave my sink a good once over too. I found an old toothbrush and cleaned around the handles. That works really well and is a trick I didn’t learn until a few years ago. And I actually cleaned the sink first. It would be gross the other way around, don’t you think?
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I talked with my oldest brother Ed this past week. That in itself is noteworthy because I hardly ever talk to any of my brothers, whereas I talk to my sisters all the time. But I was working on the next chapter of The Great RV Adventure and was feeling regretful that I had not taken any photos at Ed’s house. I was thinking about him, so I decided that I should call him.
“Justin made us the most beautiful dinning room table,” Ed told me. Justin is one of his sons. “He made it from floor joists from our old house.” Their old house, a house that had been in his wife’s family since it was built in the mid 1950’s, was close to an airport and bought by a developer. As a result, their old house had been torn down. “It’s wide and I love that. You can actually put bowls of food in the middle of the table and still have enough room for plates.” I made a picture in my head as he spoke, of a family of eleven sitting around a long table with Father at one end and Mother to his left and kids all the way up and down the sides. “Justin did a really good job on it,” Ed bragged.
“I’d love to see it. Can you send me a picture?” I asked.
Ed sent a photo to my phone, which is fine, except that in order to get it onto my computer I had to forward it to Kevin who sent it to my email.
Isn’t this table just gorgeous! Anyone would be proud to have this table in their home.
Good job Justin!
My nephew, the famous furniture maker.
<<<<<>>>>
I am pleased when anyone has anything at all to say about my writings, whether it be my stories or my letters. Last week, my chigger and poison story evoked a response from one of the redheaded beauties in my family.
Bambi, my niece, wrote, “I have been using peppermint essential oil to repel bugs (mostly spiders), but it may work with the chiggers too. And who doesn't love smelling like a candy cane?”
Thank you Bambi, I’ll pass this on and I’ll definitely try it. Where -- by the way -- does one purchase essential oils and are they expensive?
This photo was taken the last time I saw Bambi which was May of this year. Her handsome young son Russe (Russell) is in the photo with her.
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This past week had a day in it that would have been the thirty-fifth birthday of our daughter, sister, niece, cousin, fiancée, mother, and granddaughter, Kat. She was different things to different people.
I am still incredibly sad and some days are worse than others, but I definitely feel her absence the most on Sundays.
I was thinking about Kat a lot this past week, as you may well expect and before I go any further with this thought, I want to give a big shout-out to my cute little red haired sister. She was concerned about me getting through Kat’s birth day and reached out to me. Thank you Diane.
But did you know that in Kat’s generation, in my family, we lost Jessica at thirty-five years of age, Michael at thirty-three, and Kat at thirty-four? Three children, all in their mid thirties, all of the same generation and all of them parents of twins?
I know, I know. Our minds not only love patterns, they look for patterns.
I spoke with Kat’s fiancé Jesse this past week, on Facebook. He told me he doesn’t cry everyday anymore. Only about three or four times a week now.
Life goes on, as it must.
I was making a cup of coffee and that thought struck me, just like that, and it made me sad.
Jesse had a commemorative or ritual tattoo made with Kat’s cremation ashes, known as cremains so he could carry Kat with him. The design has Kat’s birth and death dates as well as their anniversary date and is based on one of Kat’s drawings.
You know, you can look back and say all kinds of corny things about a person when they are dead, but I’m going to tell you this, and I know this for sure. Kat and Jesse had a deep and abiding love for each other that most of us can only dream about.
Okay. Enough.
Enough sadness. Life does go on and here is a little life that is going to take the world by storm.
I am out of room for this week so we will have to be content with one more photo of Andrew. Here he’s holding Molly and my! Doesn’t it look like she’s having a good time!
Lots of love,
Peg and Mike
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