01:26 - 15.05.07
Catch and Release
It turns out it wasn't me after all with respect to losing my posts the past week. Our service provider has been crashing on a regular, but unpredictable basis for over a week now. My youngest muttered something about reconfiguring something when he tried to get it up and running tonight. No success for either of us for over an hour. When I did get it back up I found a few unexpected, albeit late, Mother's Day gifts. Songs I had unsuccessfully searched for on youtube showing up and songs I hadn't thought about in a multitude of European languages that are an extra blessing.
Mother's Day was relatively quiet. Number three son was on an assignment outside the city. Number five son works in the restauarant industry. Mother's Day is their busiest day of the year, so of course he was too. Number one son called from one of his contracts - the company was insistent he work as well. The fact that he has two children didn't seem to matter. Number two son's partner's mother had a stroke a couple of weeks ago and is in a long term care facility. Her father died about two years ago, so this is really a tough blow for her. They spent the day with her Mom and rightfully so. When my son was talking with me about it, he told my youngest granddaughter he was talking to me. She started kissing the phone repeatedly, so I guess she hasn't forgotten me. All of the working sons mentioned spending time together next weekend and that's fine with me. Just the phone call and the comunication were enough for me.
Number four son and his wife arrived in the late afternoon with their son - he's seven months old now. He kept us all entranced with his antics for quite some time. My youngest was demonstrating proper Jedi form with his light sabers which seemed to be a big hit. As I've noted before, I have a very large cabinet filled to bursting with stuffed toys that belonged to various sons. My youngest grandson wanted to play with each and every one of them - yes he did. We ended up sitting in a sea of colourful cuddly toys. Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh my! Dragons, geckos, owls, seals, snakes, popples, and any number of cartoon characters were his for the asking. My son pulled on some of the hand puppets to the young guy's delight. I was always amazed at the how quickly my guys would impute sentience to puppets when I would play out different stories for them when they were small. They would respond to questions and observations they believed they heard coming from the puppets as though they were real and unique individuals. Those puppet gave hours of enjoyment and there was the added bonus of having great teaching tools at the ends of one's arms. We also had marionettes, but unlike the Von Trapp family, I was never co-ordinated enough to make all the parts move in any sort of realistic way. Adding voice was just one more task that I couldn't fit with the physical aspects of the play. Maybe I'll try again for the grandbabies.
My grandson's attention was also focussed on the cats, of course. He is pretty quick in the crawl and grab department. He high centered while trying to crawl over my knees, since that was the barrier between him and those felines. Ms Snowy and Mr Boots hid for the entire visit, but the other three showed various degrees of curiosity and a rather resigned acceptance of the pokes and pats meted out to them by said baby. The one area where we really had to watch was when he grabbed for their whiskers. Fortunately his eye - hand co-ordination was just a tad slow so he didn't connect. We distracted him with crushed ice and tiny bites of whole wheat bread. The bread was to take the edge off his hunger while the ice was for the teething pains he was experiencing. Two new teeth just emerged two days ago, you see.
Number four son and his wife brought flowers and a card. In defense of that bouquet, I picked a vaseful of dandelions today to offer up to the cats. You see they love eating fresh flowers. The dandelions don't have chemicals in them such as the florist's use, so it's better for their tummies anyway. Dandelions are supposed to be great for cleansing the digestive system and for balancing out things like blood sugar. I don't think that is an issue for any of the cats, but they do seem to crave the roughage. And it helps me make good use of the weeds that wold otherwise damage the lawn - right?
A call from my one sister yesterday asking me to call her back. Could she, my Dad and one other sister come by today - Monday - so as to start taking loads of the stuff I've cleared out of the closets to the dump. My sister's health is not that good - about the same as mine actually, although for different reasons. My Dad is still fairly strong because he is always lifting and carrying in his line of work. Even so I wasn't all that fussed about them using a day off to spend doing heavy work. I know my brother-in-law just wants to get things righted for me as quickly as possible, but after coping with it for as many years as I have already I'm ok with a slower pace. My lungs won't allow for any more than that anyway. As it turned out the other sister wasn't available when morning came. My Dad still wanted to follow through, but his neighbour and he had already had plans and I wanted them to carry on with those. They were good with that so a morning of expected hard, heavy lifting became one of a more leisurely clean out of the next cubby hole that was covered by all the Elections Canada supplies. Truth is if I had a bit of help I could probably bundle up most of the stuff that needs to go to the dump for the garbagemen. There are fairly strict by-laws about how to do that though. I need a second pair of hands to be able to achieve the cutting, binding and packing is all. Think about that tomorrow. Reading and exercising were the other activities of the past couple of days. For now I think sleep would be a good choice.
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