"Why, Soitenly!"

Dear Muz:

The best news this time is Cadence … your potential next great-grandchild. Teri and Josh are hoping and praying to be able to go to China soon and bring home Maddie’s big sister. We’ve put this “out there” to have as many people as possible praying for the process and for the financial means to be provided. Your estate provided the means for Maddie to come into our lives. Who would have known you would have built up a large enough estate to do that? And most of it while you were living on Social Security and investing what little you could each month?

So many things going on in our lives right now that I wish I could discuss with you. We had so many LONG phone visits over the years but this one would take up most of a day and you’d probably go through an entire coffee pot of your black liquid. For the most part, I can’t write about our situation on a public forum but just to let you know you’ve been in my thoughts so often the past three months and I’ve missed you as never before. I guess that’s good … shows we had as good a relationship as a mother and son could have had.

But I can tell you about these grandchildren of ours and that’s one of my favorite past-times these days … talking about Jackson, Logan and Lilly.

Last week we were watching the children while Josh played his final softball game. He and his friends are starting a team for a local adult baseball league … needless to say, he’s excited about playing hardball again. Anyway, Heather wanted to go to the game so we played with the children.

Jackson loves to be chased and loves even more to have a ball and be chased in the back yard. Logan, of course, had a ball and was trying to emulate everything we were doing. Lilly was in her own little play-dough world at their picnic table under the patio cover.

When that got a little old, Janice saw a roly poly and wanted to show the kids how it rolls into a ball when touched. They were fascinated! Until Lilly got a little tired of waiting for the bug to unroll itself and crawl again … so she decided to just eat it. Fortunately Janice got to her before she could actually get it in her mouth. Three times!

We took Jackson with us on a Saturday morning to get him a donut and let him get out of the house for a while. We passed a playground and he immediately wanted to play on that playground. Being fully in control of this outing, we played on the playground. Then he wanted to go to another playground where Josh had taken him because it has BIG slides.

While there he was going up the steps when I turned my head just for a second, turned back and saw him falling off the stairs and landing flat on his stomach, eating wood chips and dirt! Had I been able to move at all, I might have at least stopped the fall a little, but it happened so fast I had no time to move. He was more upset with a mouth full of wood chips, I think. But after he settled down, he let us know the next few days that he fell and hurt himself.

And speaking of Jackson, we were eating out at a favorite restaurant when he started handing out those yellow packages of Splenda while telling us, “You don’t have to pay for these!” I think he got that from his Grinmama, but she denies it.

A lot of our memories are being formed in the context of restaurants as Josh and Heather love for anyone to go with them to help keep the kids corralled! Logan is pretty good if you just let him have his own fork. So long as he can keep food on the end of that fork and get it to his mouth, he’s happy as a lark. But forget trying to feed him … he will do that himself. And forget feeding him by hand. He wants that fork.

Lilly, on the other hand, is more interested in something sweet than something healthy. Must get that from me, but I digress. Heather got a small order of cinnamon sticks with icing and Lilly quickly discovered the better part of that order was the icing and started dipping everything in the icing! Plus her face was absolutely covered with icing.

Sunday we were eating at a favorite burger place (the owners are friends and very nice people) and Peggy (one of the owners) brought out a couple of pieces of birthday cake from one of the employees. Lilly was biting on the wipes container and accidentally pulled across the birthday cake, covering one corner with blue permanent stain icing. She licked that off and discovered a new way to enjoy a favorite meal!

And finally, they were going to Disneyland for an afternoon of relaxation, to the extent you can relax with three children that age in an amusement park. Heather put out an appeal on FaceBook to borrow a double stroller that had side-by-side seats. They have one with front / back seats, but whichever twin is in the back pitches a fit because he or she cannot see past the one in front. You would think inventors and engineers would figure these things out, wouldn’t you?

This week ends the present school year for Heather and she can hardly wait to be able to enjoy those children for the summer. They have a little pool with a slide and will play in that for hours when it’s warm enough. More than anything, though, they just want to be outside where they can run and play and be free from the confines of the in-doors.

I’m just the opposite these days. Just give me something cool to drink and let me veg out on my recliner and I’ll stay out of everyone’s way!