Vintage Photo Friday


OK - time to jump back into Vintage Photo Fridays!

These old school photos are all of my mother-in-law. The Kilgore referred to is Kilgore, Texas. Later on she became a Kilgore Rangerette, which my husband informs me is a Big Deal and Very Impressive.

Genetics crops up again, here. In the first two photos I can really see the resemblance to Youngest Girl Child, but in the two later photos she reminds me of Oldest Girl Child. I see my husband and The Boy Child in the two youngest photos, too.

It's most striking in the first and last photos - '42/'43 and '47/'48. I've seen that exact same expression on YGC's face ('42/'43). In the last photo, it's the way she's looking at the camera. She smiles like her oldest granddaughter and has a look in her eyes that I've seen in OGC's eyes.

To see other vintage photos check out Paper Dolls for Boys.

Free Music!

Amazon is giving away free mp3s to celebrate hitting one million followers to their Twitter feed. You get a credit on your account of $1.29, which is enough to give you a free song (most of them run around 99 cents.) The catch is, you have to use the credit by this Sunday, September 6.

Free mp3 from Amazon

Woohoo!! I love free stuff!

That's Who I Am

Travelin' Oma's School Days Seminar - Day 4 Homework

I missed yesterday's homework assignment, as you might have noticed. Busy, busy day. Much to do. Not to mention a nap to take. Wheee!!

~List at least 25 of your unique abilities and qualities. Words that might apply: caring, aware, generous, hospitable, tactful, open, able to teach, good cook, listener, optimist, creative, etc.

  1. Good at teaching
  2. Earnestly striving to improve
  3. Smart
  4. Good cook
  5. Fast reader
  6. Good listener
  7. Creative
  8. Imaginative
  9. Loving
  10. Forgiving
  11. Thoughtful
  12. Responsible
  13. Caring friend
  14. Compassionate
  15. Good at puzzles
  16. Like to laugh
  17. Resilient
  18. Strong
  19. Determined
  20. Conscientious
  21. Loyal
  22. Know how to preserve food - canning, drying, freezing, etc.
  23. Good at understanding people
  24. Independent
  25. Writer
This was hard to do! I got stuck at 17 and couldn't think of more for a while.

Of all my qualities, I value resiliency, strength, and determination / stubbornness the most. They are the traits that have gotten me through some very tough times.

There's a Kind of Hush

I am sitting in the house, nearly alone. The Boy Child is the only one here and he is leaving soon to go hang out with some friends. My Sweetheart has gone to work, the girls are gone to school. I have been working on shoveling out the living room, which was left in a more than usual state of chaos this morning.

Except for the buzz of the computer fan and an occasional metallic clack from the dryer, everything is quiet.

I am handling the first day of school very well. I seem to have gotten my weepies out of the way last night at 10:30 p.m. when I turned off the movie I'd been watching and starting my nightly closing-up routine. That's when it hit me that I would spend the next day without a warm little cuddlebug filling the house with her special brand of sunshine, and I broke down and spent about half an hour crying.

Yesterday was filled with getting ready. There was paperwork from orientation to be filled out, clothes to be laid out, pictures to be taken (for the school's star student* forms), backpacks to be filled up, and interspersed throughout the whole thing Oldest Girl Child's fits of glee, and Youngest Girl Child's bouts of, "But I don't want to leave you, Mommy!" followed by hugs and weeping. Her weeping, not mine.

Not that YGC was as upset as she made herself out to be. Her feelings were real, but I know her well enough to recognize when she's exaggerating or pretending more than she's really feeling. I've probably mentioned before that she does this thing where she sometimes decides how she's supposed to feel and then acts it out. Unfortunately, these feelings usually tend to be negative. She decides she's afraid of something, or some situation, for example. Or she decides she's shy. Or she decides she doesn't like something. That's what she's been doing with school - taking her normal trepidation and acting out this dramatic, negative scenario.

I recognize what she's doing, because, well, that's what I used to do when I was little. It wasn't a positive trait for me either. In fact, it caused me a great deal of trouble in my early years, especially the tendency toward being negative. If I had allowed myself to be positive, it might have worked to help me, instead of hinder me, but... *shrug* With YGC, I'm working on teaching her to overcome that negativity, to be positive and find a way to make the good happen, instead of going all passive and moving to avoid the bad that might never come.

I hope I am doing the right things to help her. It scares me to think of how difficult her life will be if she doesn't learn this.

For example: Last night OGC said to me, "Mommy, do you remember the girl who sat at my table during orientation? I think she wants me to be her friend. She looked like she was shy."

I couldn't help flashing back to what YGC said after leaving her orientation. "I don't think they want to be my friends."

They are both going to be self-fulfilling prophecies, if I can't head YGC off.

When she forgets to be negative, though, YGC is very excited about going to school. Just before bedtime last night the two of them were literally jumping with excess energy and the decibel levels were getting alarmingly high.

We had orientation a couple of nights ago, which had us going to the school for the girls to meet their new teachers, and for me to get school supply lists and find out what the teachers' expectations are for this school year.

YGC's teacher seems very nice. YGC had drawn a picture for her (a fountain, I was informed, looking at the confusion of blue marker blobs and lines) which we gave her as soon as we got in the room. She smiled brightly at YGC, thanked her and said she'd hang it up. She gave us a sheet of paper with everything we might need to know - start times, lunch times, etc. I would have loved her for that alone. In Oldest Girl Child's previous years at school no-one has ever done that for me. I know more now about how the school operates than I ever have.

OGC's teacher is the only man teaching in this school. I think this will be a good experience for her. I was impressed by his manner during the orientation, and rather taken aback by his announcing that the kids didn't need to bring any school supplies. He will provide everything they need, although we are welcome to donate anything we like. So I sent OGC off to school this morning with everything we'd bought for her, telling her to give it to her teacher.

We've been working for the last month on getting YGC in the habit of getting up at 6:30. She is a little night owl, much like her parents, and has always been resistant to a schedule. Oh, I could get her on one, if I worked hard enough, but the first breath of wind that came along would knock her off that perch.

Really, the amazing thing is not that YGC is a night owl, but that OGC is such a lark. She's been waking up at 6:30 all summer, just because that's what she's used to and she likes to get up that early. She's like my brother S, who has also always mystified me. After half a lifetime of early risings I still hate, hate, hate them, and take several minutes to figure out how to keep my balance and make my eyes focus. If I jump out of bed too quickly I tend to walk into walls.

To make life easier (on me), we bought the girls a nightlight alarm clock. OGC is usually up before the alarm goes off, but YGC has been waking up very nicely to the alarm and, after taking a few minutes (to get her balance and focus her eyes?), will stagger out to the living room, wrapped in a blanket. She'll huddle in a corner of the couch watching some half hour show, like Fetch, or Cyberchase, then emerge to announce that she's hungry.

Last night, we discussed the morning procedure for school days. "No TV until you are dressed!" I told them. OGC was fine with this. In fact, she was up and mostly dressed when I staggered out of the bedroom this morning. My alarm goes off five minutes before theirs, so I was able to hear their alarm when it went off. YGC staggered out, OGC went to turn on the TV, and I stopped her. "Remember? Clothes?"

"Oh, right!" So then OGC turned to chivvying her sister into her clothes.

TV is a great motivator. YGC was moving in record time.

Their father is working swing shift right now, but he wanted to be up to see them off, so I got him up at a quarter after, and he joined us for scripture study and family prayer. Then we headed off to the bus.

Which was 20 minutes late.

This was good and bad. It gave YGC time to play with the other kids at the bus stop and relax. It also, however, gave her more time to agonize and cry and worry about bad things. In the end, though, when the bus drove off she was grinning as she waved to me from her window.

And then I went home and took a nap, which was absolutely delicious. Right now I feel rather weird, kind of twitchy and itchy. Even with TBC here the house feels empty. I'm feeling very relaxed after that nap (two whole hours!! Do you know how long it's been since I took a long nap like that? Usually I catch, at most, 15 minutes, and even then it's frequently been while sitting up with YGC on my lap.) I've been cleaning, while rejoicing that it won't all be undone in the next half hour. I would listen to music, but I'm enjoying the silence way too much. It's so nice and peaceful here right now.

But the emptiness is still making my skin feel weird.
___________________________________________
* Every student at the school fills out one of these forms. Over the year the school counselor will randomly draw a few every week, which will go up in the cafeteria until the next week. When they come down, the kids get to take them home, along with a folder and a certificate and pencil. I guess it is meant to be a self-esteem builder kind of thing.**

**Something that tends to backfire on OGC. Last year she came home from field day with a ribbon for participation. She ignored it until I picked it up and said, "Oh! You got a ribbon?" She kind of rolled her eyes and said, "Yeah, everyone got one of those." It's now just another toy, played with rather less than most of the others. She does enjoy being a star student and having her picture up, though. She adores attention.

I Would Have Rather Had a Root Canal

Travelin' Oma's School Days Seminar - Day 2 Homework

~Blog about a trip that was a disaster. Ideas: "Our honeymoon should have been perfect, but" or "I woke up in Disneyland with chickenpox."

To be honest, my memory is a little hazy about that trip. Or maybe not hazy. Maybe I've just repressed large blocks of time.

We had gone travelling the previous summer with The Boy Child. I was 7 months pregnant with Oldest Girl Child, huge, miserable, already short of breath. It was only meant to be a day or two, but after visiting Kirtland we thought we'd jaunt on up to Palmyra, and after getting to Palmyra we realized the Hill Cumorah Pageant was going on and that seemed like something not-to-be-missed, so we stayed to see that, and, all in all, it wound up being a week before we got home.

It was a tiring, breathless trip, filled with small mishaps, but also full of wonderful experiences, memories that I still treasure. So, the next summer, it seemed only logical to block out the time to take a trip to Nauvoo to see the temple during its open house.

The trip wasn't all bad. I saw my first fireflies. I saw the place where some of my ancestors lived. Ummmm ...

Give me a second. I'm thinking.

Things went wrong from the beginning. OGC was the sort of baby you couldn't overstimulate. She was never happier than when in the middle of a noisy crowd, a trait that was apparent in her first few days. They was so much to see! Hear! Do! Learn! Even then, she was a raging extrovert.

Which meant that, faced with the stimulation of a trip, she wouldn't sleep. All day long that first day of travel, sitting in her car seat, watching the countryside outside her window, nearly delirious with delight. That night, at the motel, at 2 a.m., with an exhausted sobbing Mommy, who still hadn't learned to let Daddy take over sometimes.

I go blank after that.

The next thing I remember is standing in line to tour Carthage Jail. It was sooo hot. The line was huge. OGC wanted to get down and practice walking. I was Excessively Tired and Not Happy. I left my husband standing in line with the baby while TBC and I went to find a drinking fountain and a bathroom. I looked at several highly memorable and significant Mormon memorabilia with complete indifference, then shuffled back to the line to find my baby running around barefoot. Some ... woman ... had taken it upon herself to remove my infant daughter's footwear. It was too hot for a baby to be wearing shoes! she told me, smiling cheerily at the woman she obviously considered a completely incompetent mother. I was too angry to speak.

... filing through the uppper room at Carthage jail, hot, hot, hot, very crowded, just wanting to get out of there ... driving to Nauvoo, where we parked amid a huge number of cars, then walked and walked to get to the restored cabins ... TBC (or was it his father?) leaving my camera behind at the blacksmith's demonstration and not realizing until much too late that we'd lost it - all our photos, gone! ... getting baby food at some convenient grocery store ... sitting on the floor with an excited baby, so so tired, and too afraid to let her cry herself to sleep, because the noise might get us in trouble with the hotel management ...

The next day it is our turn to take a tour through the Nauvoo Temple. We are short on time when we finally get there, I don't remember why. Realize the baby's wet, ask where is a convenient place to change her. Get blank looks from the volunteers. After much discussion, get directed to a portable restroom, which doesn't alarm me. This isn't the first LDS temple open house I've been to, after all, and the facilities are uniformly clean and sweet smelling. (We put a lot of effort into making these things nice.)

Open the door and walk into the nastiest, filthiest public bathroom I've ever seen. Nowhere to lay the baby down but the floor and I didn't even want to set a foot on that floor, much less my baby. Obviously the volume of visitors has overwhelmed the small Mormon community in the area. Go back to the volunteers. I am worrying about missing the scheduled time for our tour. More confusion and blank looks from the volunteers. Impossible and ridiculous suggestions. I give up (she's only wet) and we get in line.

Ask another volunteer several minutes later, when we are nearly at the head of the line if there is anywhere to change a baby. Well, maybe. Back there? He thinks? Checking it out would mean losing our place in line, possible losing our chance to see the temple, all on the weight of a "maybe". Decide to take my chances with the perceptibly loaded diaper, but feeling increasingly frazzled and unhappy. Not to mention, the baby is heavy. I'd pass her to her father, but if her diaper goes, my dress is easier to clean than his suit.

More waiting in another line. We finally get in the temple. I am too upset and distressed, too worried about the baby's diaper to enjoy the once in a lifetime experience.

And then it happens. The diaper hits critical overload and a long line of liquid splashes down my dress. Luckily the absorbent fabric of my skirt catches it all. The brand new carpet I am standing on (back aching) is safe and dry.

I am ready to burst into tears.

We finish, go back out. See another volunteer, ask again about a place to change the baby. Get directed down a long staircase, to the first bathroom. Back aching, dress stinking, feet hurting, I look at those long stairs, then lose it entirely and give the poor young woman the most venomous glare and refusal I have ever given anyone in my life, frightening her and causing my husband to look at me as if I have lost my mind.

Sit impatiently and angrily through TBC and my husband eating something sweet. Frantic to get back to the car, where I can finally change the baby. Finally, finally, FINALLY!!! get to change the baby. Trying not to be angry on the way back to the hotel. Trying not to ruin the experience for TBC and my husband. Not succeeding.

The baby finally started sleeping a little on the trip back, but I still can't think about that trip without getting angry and weepy over it. And while we'll talk sometimes about the previous summer's trip to Kirtland, no-one ever brings up the Nauvoo trip.

It was years before we traveled for fun again.