lessons i have (recently) learned

The grandkids and granddog are here this weekend, and as usual, they are teaching me some important life lessons:

1. No matter how fast I work, two hands and a container of Clorox Clean-Ups cannot keep up with the drips and messes that three 8 year olds, a 3 year old, a 66 year old, and one 6 month old Golden Retriever can make.  The math simply doesn't compute.  I was outnumbered before I picked up the container.

2. Lucy the Golden Retriever holds a grudge.  No matter how lovely her bath experience is, complete with mood lighting and incense, said dog will still get up in the middle of the night and urinate in the carpet to show who has the last word (or pee).  Then she will smile about it.

3. Gramps will cook breakfast for the kids, but he won't clean up the dog's urine.  But he will be considerate enough to wake me up at 6 AM on my day off to tell me the the dog peed the carpet. AFTER I clean up the pee spot, Gramps will tell me it probably happened because he closed the bedroom door during the night.  Too many night lights (read every lamp in the house on) disturbed his sleep, and he forgot that the dog would need to be able to get to ME to let me know she had to go out.  So peeing on the carpet was all my fault.

4. Telling the grands they stink is not an effective way to shame them into taking a bath.  They take pride in stinking.  The only effective tool is withholding cookies until they do get up and hit the shower.

5. Kids riding 4 wheelers in the yard is an effective way to exercise Lucy the dog.  It also keeps Lucy's attention and prevents wandering.  Until you want her to come in.  Then she turns into a greased pig and you can't lay a finger on her.

6. Guilt over forgetting your granddaughter's antibiotic will cause a return trip a day later to pick up the medicine for the cure.  Seventy miles of guilty road trip.  Although I still have to bear the burden of missing a couple doses.  (The bonus: all 4 kids get to stay with son and drive him crazy for a few hours.)  

7. Grandchildren will never spare your feelings if it means lying.  Maddie yesterday: "Grammy I hate to tell you this but this gravy doesn't taste good and I can't eat it."  I made that gravy from scratch, rather than the packaged crap Gramps fixes.  Maddie prefers the packaged crap powdered gravy.

8. It never pays to clean up my house before the grands arrive.  Five minutes after they get here, it looks like it did five minutes after they arrived for their LAST visit.  Which actually adds some symmetry to my life.

9.  I am the only one who can hear in this family.  The grands, Steve, Jim, and the granddog are all deaf to the sound of my voice.  But their noses all work fine.  They can smell a meal cooking from a mile away.

10. Maddie makes awesome meatballs.  Especially when I remember to tell her to go wash the dog hair off her hands before she gets too far into rolling them.  (We only had a few fuzzy meatballs in the pot, not even enough to cause a hairball in the throat.)

11. If you take a nap at my house when Sunday
dinner is ready, be prepared to eat tuna fish out of the package and gingerbread cookies.  Gramps might cook enough to feed us all, but when the spoon starts dipping servings, it is every woman for herself.  Even if the only reason you had to have the nap was because the dog kept licking your arm all night because she was lonely. 

12. Lucy can outrun us all.  So Steve doesn't even try.  He lets her in, waits until she's run mud all over the house, then wipes her paws off.

I give up.  I'm outnumbered.   I have medication somewhere to help me get through this. :)


...life is good. ~cath
 @jonesbabie on Twitter

lessons I have recently learned

the first alyssum blossoms of the season

1. You can be 60 years old and still get a zit big enough to make you remember why you hated puberty.
2. Never try dry shampoo on red hair.  Especially right before attending a public function.  Red hair + dry shampoo (which is white) = pink hair.  Only not in a good way.  More like old lady pink hair.
3. Artificial nails go on much easier than they come off.
4. No matter how smart you think you are, an 8 year old is smarter. And they know it.
5. Laughter cures all ills.  Except a sore toe.  That takes drugs.  Lots of them.
6. If you are the last one to pour a glass of wine from the wine bottle, no one will know you lick the drip off the lip of the bottle.  Unless you leave lipstick marks behind.
7. If you plant your shorter flowers in the back of the flowerbed, and the taller ones in front, the short flowers will genetically mutate and grow taller.  Because flowers are vain and want to be seen.
8. When you miss your sisters the most, or you are in a tough spot in life, they know it and call or text you.  And that makes everything better.  Every single time.
9. Plants and trees make good therapists.  And they don't charge you or tell you stupid stuff.
10. Grand kids grow as fast as their parents did.  Which is sad, because it is too fast.  Always.  The blink of an eye and they go from babies to people.

And the best lesson I have learned, or been reminded of actually, is that strength comes from within me.  No one can touch it, or take it away.  I may misplace it sometimes, but it is right there in my center, waiting for me to return and claim it.

Namaste.

...life is good. ~cath
find me @jonesbabie on Twitter

there's something about mary

I've started this post at least three times now.  Writing about my mother is not an easy task.  She is strong willed, and raised three daughters who are just as strong, in different ways.  I wanted to give her something for her birthday, on Christmas day, then decided that writing about my mom goes way beyond a birthday post.

Mom grew up in the Great Depression.  Something that is foreign to most people from the current generation, and is only familiar to my generation because we were told, over and over, how hard the Depression was.

Born on Christmas Day because of a fall my Grandma took on the ice on her way to Mass on Christmas Eve at midnight, mom made her way into the world, and was kind of puny from the get go.  Little did anyone know, she had mettle that would get her through birth and childhood, and into adulthood.
Mom had dark hair, and green eyes, and I can only imagine her as a child.  I have a vivid imagination, but because of the relationship I have had with my mother, I never really thought of her as a child.  She has always been the iron willed woman in my life, the one who was controlling when I was a teenager, so much so that a couple nights before I got married, when I foolishly thought a curfew didn't matter and arrived late (very late) home from a date with my soon to be husband, mom met me at the door and set my ears on fire with her words.  I still remember those words:

"As long as you live in my house, you will live by my rules.  Until you are married, those rules stand."

This was also the same woman, who told me on my way out the door on June 9, 1970, that she didn't want me to feel pressured to get married.  It was my choice, not because she didn't want me at home.

My mother has always been a dichotomy to me.  Someone I could never quite figure out.  Someone who I felt rushed headlong into divorce, and yet managed to raise us, and fix TVs and do plumbing when the need arose.  A woman who depended on no one to provide for her, or her girls.  A woman who taught us our work ethic, and that anything worth doing was worth doing well, and doing right.  A woman who reinforced this by dumping our dresser drawers in the middle of the floor in a pile if they weren't neatly organized according to her standards (yes, she inspected everything).

Mom was a woman I was often angry at, or hurt by.  I often thought it was because she didn't understand me.  For many years I held a lot of resentment and turmoil inside me, thinking that mom didn't really understand me, and that she was a selfish person, basically.

But now, in the past year or so, I think about other things.

About the times when I was living and working in California, driven to the brink of insanity by my sister, and mother was the voice of reason.  She never took sides.  She just listened to me, and counseled me, and made me see my sister through her eyes.  And made me realize this sister was part of me, part of my heart, and that no amount of aggravation would change our love for each other.  My mother, the person I thought had the most unreasonable temper of us all, turned out to be the person who balanced me, and centered me, who made me realize that with all our warts and imperfections, we are still all special.

All these thoughts, and feelings, jelled suddenly the other day, when Stevie Wonder brought an envelope to me at work, from my Uncle Jack.  I opened it and saw this:

Mom is on the left.  I just stared at it.  And felt like I had been hit in the chest with a brick.  When Steve left and I was alone, I began to cry.  I turned the photo over, and saw the date on the back of it.  1943.  Mom was in the eighth grade.  That is her on the left.

Suddenly, I realized.  Mary is much more than just my mom.  She has lived a life, a long life.  She was a child, and a young girl, a young woman and mother.  A woman of substance and strength.  And now she is an elder, and someone I relate to in more ways than even she or I realize.

There's something about Mary.  Something that is hard to understand, and impossible to label.  So I won't try.

I'll just say thank you Mary.  Thanks for everything.  There are no more words than that.

Except I love you.

...life is good. ~cath

find me @jonesbabie on Twitter