Brianhead Trip 2012
About once a year we borrow my husbands cousins condo in Utah. They are very generous with the use of the condo with all the family and its a beautiful place. It’s part of a fourplex and easily sleeps 14. It sits at 10,000 feet with a killer view and very few neighbors, its quiet and beautiful and in the winter you can sit at the window or on the balcony and watch the skiers. Wow, are we lucky!
This year most of us were together for 4 days, a few of us for a week longer than that. We prepared all our food in advance, we packed games and movies and books, we loaded up teenagers and grown ups…
Grandparents vs Parents
I’ve heard it said a million times: If I knew how much fun it was to be a grandparent I would have done that first!
I have loved my kids with a fierce passion. It has been my every thought and life's work to help them grow into the wonderful, caring, responsible people they are, so I always took umbrage with the grandparenting thing being a better thing. I am now the grandmother of 4 little girls……..now I get it.
Being a grandma or nana as I’m currently called is so fabulous! Yes I love them, I feel responsible for them, I worry about them, but I am not responsible for the general care and welfare of these little…
Getting to know you
This last weekend we had our entire family together for the first time in about 10 months. That may not seem like a lot to some, but to me it was a very long time, especially when it had been that long since I had seen our now 2 year old grand daughter and I had never met her almost 3 month old sister. But for 4 days we were all together and it was wonderful. We had time to get to know one another a bit and learn each others rhythms and share stories.
One of my favorite things about the reunion was watching our two 2 year old grand daughters come to know one another. There was much…
Mothers Day Dinner
I’ve written about eating dinner together as an extended family before and I probably will again. But this is something I think we have begun to dismiss or take for granted as a people. Eating together as a family is a wonderful thing, eating together as an extended family, even more wonderful.
On Mothers Day my kids and my sister took a poll of the mothers in the family of their favorite foods, and with a delicate hand chose something from each persons list and put together a dinner from the results. It was a delicious meal of twice baked potatoes, London broil, fruit salad and home baked rolls, with a delicious chocolate cake for dessert. They all worked together…
Nana and Poppy
When we first learned we were going to become grandparents one of our sons was asking what we would like his kids to call us. I know lots of family have traditional names or cultural names or even names that the grandparents pick out themselves. Labels haven’t ever meant a whole lot to me. I’ve never cared if I was called Mrs. or Aunt or whatever, so I didn’t really have an opinion about what the grandkids should call me. My husband didn’t care either.
So babies are born and the parents just refer to us as grandma and grandpa. It would be safe to assume that the kids would follow that example and call us that too. But the…