So... Grandma died. As Jack said to my girlfriend while I was gone, "that's too bad for her." All kidding aside, it has been a great opportunity to reflect on my Grandma Jones' life and her legacy. She was a wonderful woman who knew how to do all kinds of things. It's funny... growing up I spent a lot of time with my dad's mom and who I am today reflects those experiences. What's crazy is that as I have grown older and more experienced (like that?) I find myself trying to gain the kind of knowledge and wisdom I would have gained from my Grandma Jones if I had been able to spend more time with her in my formative years. Two weeks ago, for Sunday dinner, Allie and I made fried chicken and mashed potatoes, with what my Grandma would have called "milk gravy." Fried chicken was my Grandma's go-to meal, and one that we would always request when we would visit. Boy the taste of that gravy took me back. One thing we discovered while on our vacation was the uncanny resemblance between my Grandma and Erin at roughly the same point in their lives. I'll have to post the picture another time, as it's in my van which is in the shop..... wait for it later.
One of the best things about the time we spent dealing with Grandma's sickness and death was the time we were able to spend together as a family. For whatever reasons, neither of my sister-in-laws came with their husbands to Washington for the weekend, and Matt stayed home with my brood, so it was just my parents, my brothers and me. It was awesome! I have intended to blog about this experience separately, but obviously, it hasn't happened.
Aren't those handsome folks? As I spent the weekend with these people that I love, I was reminded of all the fun times we have shared. Over breakfast one morning, we figured it has been nearly 20 years since it has just been the five of us and although getting married and having children has definitely changed us, we are still the same goofy people we were before. On a couple of occasions, we all crammed into one car and drove to our various destinations. Ben and Greg, winning the "tall contest" found themselves in the front controlling our destination and the tunes we listened to, and I found myself squished in the back with my parents. It has been a long time since we all have laughed that hard. I'm talking tears and side aches people. It was so nice. We did all the things that it's a pain in the butt to take kids to do... which translates to eating where we want, when we want. If you missed it in my earlier posts, we like to eat, which honestly speaks volumes, but that may be for another time. Anyway, one day, we had breakfast at the Cheesecake Factory, lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. Ugghhhh. We were stuffed, but it was so much fun. We went to Pike's Market and walked around... we went to the mall and bought matching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hats.....We went and saw a memorial for Jimi Hendrix....
And screamed for the chocolate volcano at the Rainforest Cafe......
We sat in the gorilla section, by the way. Sorry the pictures suck... the light was bad and all I had was my cell phone.Anyway, we didn't have to stop anywhere unexpected for a potty break the entire time. We stopped at McDonald's on the way to a wedding because we weren't sure whether they were going to have food at the wedding. Greg ordered a Happy Meal and we got Farmer Smurf! We relived the days of classic wrestling; mourned Macho Man Randy Savage, Andre the Giant and sang the Hulk Hogan theme song and tried to decide what the right event would be for the Undertaker's anthem. Everybody laughed at me when I turned retarded and dropped my $7 Cold Stone ice cream for no apparent reason and we had fun at the Seahawks and Mariners team stores.
It was so much fun and it was just what I needed.
On to the next event..... my new nephew! Dave and Holli (sibs on Matt's side) had their first little guy a couple of weeks early on August 15th. Grayson Paul Pierce was 7 pounds 4 ounces and 20 1/2 long. What a cutie!
That means that the Pierce family has had three little ones added this year and they will all be the same year in school.
Aspen Joy Pierce
January 9, 2011
William Homer Pierce
January 16, 2011
Grayson Paul Pierce
August 15, 2011
We are so blessed!
This is good; to be counting my blessings. Things have been a little tense at our house lately. We have been working hard on our back yard, trying to get things in order. We built a little stone patio for our fire pit and are working on having a deck built. Matt has been drawing plans and looking at materials, and the crabgrass is FREAKING out of control! I hope to have pictures of the progress to post in a couple of weeks. On the plus side, we finally got our gopher. We hired a "wildlife specialist" (read, varmint hunter) to come and kill the thing and her trap worked. Matt wanted to put his head on a pike in the garden, but the smell was too strong. Hopefully my flowering pear will come back and we can finally grow beans in our garden unmolested.
Will has started to crawl, finally. I say finally, because Aspen is a wonder baby and has been crawling for a couple of months now. It's not the prettiest crawl I have seen, but it gets him where he wants to go and nothing is off limits anymore. We have had to lower his crib mattress because he has figured out how to pull himself up and I was worried he was going to take a nose dive. He is still such a happy baby and although he has no teeth, as of yet, he is eating food and loving it. We are so happy that he is part of our family, although I think he really misses the big kids while they are at school.
We got a new couch. Now we can all sit in the basement and watch a movie together. Which is awesome! We've had so much fun hanging out, eating Daddy Popcorn and watching shows since the couch was delivered that it might just be worth the money we spent!
The van, the mother ship, the home base and my everything.... she is broken. She needs a new transmission, to the tune of $3800. I think this repair about wipes out her residual value, but we are not resigning her to the scrap heap just yet. She is being fixed, which is good, because we can no longer fit our whole family in Matt's car, putting a damper on our Labor Day options.
I think that about covers it. I'm sure there is stuff I missed, but hopefully it's mostly back to school stuff, which will be covered in my next post. Here's to a great September!
2 comments:
how fun to go just the 5 of you with out all of the baggage you had aquired. lol. awesome!
Bless Grandma Jones for giving us that opportunity. She has always been "all about visiting"...and we certainly got to do just that!
Post a Comment