Sunday, February 6
It’s Super Bowl Sunday! Are you a Steeler or Packer fan (or is your team watching from home)?
It was a typical Sunday morning for us except that we didn’t get away from the house as early as we usually do. The weather was a little dicey, so Mother and TJ decided to not go to church today. Barbara and I decided to forego the fellowship breakfast and Sunday school and stay home to help Mother get ready for Sophie’s arrival.
When we did get away, we drove out to Our Little Lot to check on Big V and turn the water off. Our predicted warmer weather for the week has been re-predicted to extremely low temperatures for a few nights, so we thought we’d better just shut everything but the furnace off. While we were, we thought we might as well take some photos of our lot with a relatively fresh blanket of snow on the ground. As we were scouting out the places we wanted to shoot, we discovered that one of the trees in the gully had fallen during the most recent storm. It was a good-sized tree that was rooted very close to where the stream runs through the gully and the combination of super-saturated ground, heavy snow, and strong winds managed to uproot it and bring it down.
Our Sunday morning service at Yantis was another very informative lesson from the book of Nehemiah, with David giving us new insight and perspective on a series that he preached/taught when we were in the church in Liberal.
We were going to get the MP3 player from Lisa so we could go home and burn CDs of Wednesday’s Bible study lesson, but Lisa told us they had to cancel the group on Wednesday because of heavy snow in the Yantis area. That was news to us because we didn’t have snow in Mineola until later in the week and figured Yantis was the same. In any case, that did free up our afternoon (we thought).
As we returned to Mineola from Yantis, Barbara took advantage of the bright sunlight and the blue sky to take some pictures of Lake Fork as we drove over the bridge. That area of the lake never fails to provide a “Kodak moment.”
After unloading and putting away the groceries and other items we had bought, we had a quick lunch and then a little nap to warm up for the big evening.
TJ and her granddaughter Arriana came over later in the afternoon to visit. While we were there, we got Mother to the kitchen and spent about an hour going over family history, particularly medical history, to complete a set of forms for the new neurologist that Mother will be seeing on February 28. We’re hoping that Dr. Plotkin, who has a reputation for aggressively treating Parkinsonism, will have some new strategies and methods for helping Mother get through the current stage of the disease.
By the time we finished the paperwork and TJ and Arianna had left, we had missed the first quarter of the football game (and the butchering of the National Anthem). We had a few phone calls along the way so I ended up seeing only about six plays of the first half and almost none of the third quarter (I had already decided that no matter what, I would miss the halftime show).
During the course of the evening we also received and sent several text messages to family and friends. Whitney and John, mindful of the fact that we are technically capable of receiving pictures on our phones (even if we aren’t technically savvy about what to do with them) sent pictures of John and Carols’ grandson Rhett and Whitney and Jim’s son Little Jimmy as they watched the Super Bowl game (Jimmy a wearing a shirt that we sent him this week). Since we don’t have a way to download the pictures directly to our computer files, Barbara figured out a way to go through Sprint online to get them and then added the clever voice balloons before saving them to our photo files and posting them on our Facebook pages.
And yes, John, we now know the proper way to spell Poppie…just didn’t have the time to go back through the whole process necessary to correct our error.
Monday, February 7
Last night was not for sleeping. Mother was up several times during the night and once I get up with her, I’m awake for another hour. Barbara and I were both up with her a couple of times, so it was nearly 5:30 this morning before all three of us were sleeping soundly.
When Mother woke up for the day, we quickly swung into our daily routine of getting her meds taken, newspaper and coffee ready, and waiting an hour until she could have breakfast.
While Barbara was figuring out what to do for breakfast, I wrapped several packages that we wanted to get mailed today and then made copies of all the paperwork that needed to be mailed to Dr. Plotkin.
As we were going through our Facebook pages this morning, Barbara found several pictures of Randi and worked them into a collage. It’s hard to believe that Randi is now 16, a high school sophomore, and a soon-to-be high school junior. Our kids and grandkids are making old folks out of us!
Sometime during the morning our friends Gene and Michelle came by. They were in town to run errands and just wanted to visit for a bit. After our flurry of activity, we were also ready for some adult conversation, so their visit was a welcome break from our Monday morning madness.
When Barbara went to Mother’s room to give Mother a shower, I went to the post office to send out the packages and other assorted pieces of mail; then I stopped by Dr. Bankhead’s office to see about getting a shot for a sore arm. My left arm has been bothering me for several weeks and I just can’t seem to get any relief from it. It took an hour of waiting, but Dr. Bankhead diagnosed it as tennis elbow and ordered steroid shot and some pills.
By the time I got home, Barbara had lunch ready for the three of us…Pedro’s tamales and assorted chips, cheeses, and my world famous refried beans. Keith, Mother’s physical therapist, came by as we were finishing our meal. We talked Keith into trying some of the tamales and he agreed that they were very good.
As soon as we were all finished eating, Keith took Mother out of the room to begin her physical therapy and Barbara and I cleaned the living room and kitchen and got the dishwasher going.
The evening was quiet and uneventful…just time spent taking care of the regular business of keeping up with the house and the motorhome.
Tuesday, February 8
Happy Birthday to brother-in-law Tom Hargrave in Cleburne, Texas!!!
We did get some pretty good sleep last night, so I was able to wake up this morning and drive to Yantis for prayer meeting. On the way back from Yantis I stopped to check on Big V and make sure everything was ready for the arctic blasts that were predicted to come in tonight and linger for a few days.
When I got home, I had a bite of breakfast and then went to a meeting with Mother’s Edward Jones representative and a CPA to discuss the status of some of Mother’s investments.
Barbara and I decided we had to go to the salon to see if Leslie could do anything about our shaggy hair styles. Luckily, Leslie worked us into her schedule and we each felt we were five pounds lighter when we left the shop.
While Barbara was in the chair, I went to Pizza Hut and ordered pizza and breadsticks for our special night for Mother tonight. Then, when Leslie started on me, Barbara went over and picked up our pizza order. When we were finished getting our hair done, we went across the street to Brookshire’s to pick up an ice cream cake for Mother’s 88th birthday celebration.
At 5:00, Gene and Michelle came to the house, we heated up the pizzas (they brought one yesterday and we got another today) and breadsticks, rearranged the living room furniture so we could all see the TV, and then brought Mother in to eat pizza and ice cream cake and watch The Bucket List. Mother, Gene, and Michelle had not seen the movie before, but they thoroughly enjoyed it and Barbara and I saw some things that we had either missed or just did not remember from the last time we saw it.
Of course, no celebration of any kind is complete without lots of pictures, so we kept the camera ready to record the events of this evening as we began the almost week-long celebration of Mother’s birthday.
Wednesday, February 9
This morning was just business as usual as we took care of regular chores around the house and saw that Mother was up and around for the day.
Barbara started on lunch while I went downtown for a meeting with Leon, Mother’s Edward Jones representative, to finalize some investment opportunity plans. I got the mail and ran a couple of other little chores while I was out and then returned home for Birthday Celebration, Part 2.
This afternoon we ate our lunch and then retired to the living room for our Wednesday matinee featuring Grumpy Old Men, one of our favorite movies. When we were finished with the movie, we told Mother that she had to stick around for another 25 minutes for a special showing and then put on the birthday DVD that we have been working on.
Some time back we decided that we wanted to do something special for Mother’s 88th birthday. She said she didn’t want a party like we had last year. Instead, we sorted through over a hundred years of photographs to give a retrospective of Mother’s family and her life up through this month. We don’t know how many photographs we combed through to find 25 minutes worth, but there were a bunch.
When we had the photos scanned and saved in the right order (Mother and her family, Daddy and his family, courting days, boys in their early years, and boys in their later years, grandchildren and great grand children, etc.), we started putting the background music together. Without telling Mother what we were doing, Barbara asked her if she was to have to watch a 25 minute presentation, what kind of music she would want to listen to. Mother said she’d prefer music from the World War II years, which suited many of the photos perfectly.
Once the DVD started, Mother started asking where we found those photos. We told her we just had to dig through boxes and envelopes and there they were. Then, we noticed that her feet were tapping away in time to the music. When the section with In the Mood for background music came along, she commented that she had “danced many a mile to that song.”
We had a lot of fun putting the whole show together, but the real fun and excitement was in watching Mother view the old photos, listen to some of her favorite music, and relive the highlights of 88 years. To say she was appreciative of our efforts and their results would be an understatement, and that pleased us no end.
Tonight Barbara and I did a couple of loads of laundry and some ironing as we began planning and packing for a trip to Artesia.
Thursday, February 10
Today was a whirlwind of activity as we did more laundry, cleaned house, and prepared several of Mother’s birthday DVDs to mail to my brothers, and our children and grandchildren.
We also had all the last minute errands to take care of before leaving for several days, but after a busy 8 or 9 hours, we had the car packed, Sophie in place to take care of Mother in our absence, and everything else squared away. We pulled away from the house at 4:00, made a stop at Our Little Lot in Holiday Villages to get some things from Big V, and then headed out to Artesia via the Wichita Falls and Lubbock route, stopping in Gainesville for the night when it got too dark to see where we were going.
“The miracle of God is seen in every sunrise.” – Unknown (we found this saying on a cross plaque we gave a former student whose husband gave up his life in Afghanistan for the cause of freedom.)
On the road again…Jim/Dad/Gramps & Barbara/Mom/Grams
