Monday, April 21, 2014

Great Weekend

Wow, what a great weekend!  The weather's really been warming up and today it got into the mid-60's.  I found all kinds of things to do outside, just so I could enjoy the weather.  Sadly, though it was warm, it was very overcast, so it wasn't quite as springy feeling as it could have been.  But, I got my raspberry bushes trimmed back, raked some gravel out of the ditch, cleared out the old vegetation in the flower bed along the granary since the irises are starting to poke through and cleared a little bit of the built up mess in the chicken coop and dumped it into the garden-come June, my plants will be loving that.  Another sign of spring is that apparently the weasels are out and about, I found a dead chicken in the coop last night when I went to lock things up, so now I'm down to 15 laying hens.  I'm debating getting a few chicks ordered to get the flock numbers up.  I don't need more than 15 chickens, but I don't want much less than that either, and sometimes it doesn't take much to lose a bunch of chickens to a predator or some kind of chicken disease.

Yesterday we had something special for church all day, then went to Rent-a-Grandmas for supper.  Homemade fish boil, YUM!  That could potentially be one of the last meals our family will be eating at her house.  She's putting the place up for sale and planning on moving to Virginia to be near 2 of her kids and the grandbabies (that's babies she just found out grandbaby #2 is coming in September).  Her daughters were both there and have been helping her get the house ready to put up for sale.  I hadn't seen either one of her girls in a couple years, and it was great to see them and have a gabfest.  We used to spend so much time together when they lived here, her oldest and I were roomies before I got married and she also lived in Hawaii the same time we did, so we would island hop for some time together.  Her youngest daughter loves kids and spend a lot of time babysitting the angels when they were little - as a matter of fact, we were talking about when WE was a baby last night. He was an incredibly crabby baby and Shelley would take him off our hands one night a week so the rest of us could have at least one quiet, non screaming baby meal a week.  WE denied that he ever could have been that bad, but there were too many of us there who remembered those days, so we weren't falling for it.

Grandma also asked the kids if there was something special from her house that they wanted.  I think we were all pleased with their choices, though they did give us some laughs.  Rather than pick something big and valuable, Angel #4's immediate pick was a snow globe/music box that plays Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.  Whenever she would spend the night at grandma's house, she would wind  up that music box and listen to it as she fell asleep at night.  WE also knew what song it played, so I'm guessing that it was something that all the kids did when they spent the night there.  WE announced that he wanted the sippy cup. It was an old sippy cup she always kept around for when little kids were there. I don't have a clue why that meant so much to the kids, but Angel #4 totally agreed with his choice of keepsake.  They were both disappointed to find out that the cup has sprung a leak and grandma had thrown it away.  His second choice was a couple of plastic cereal bowls that had a straw built in so you could drink the milk from your bowl of cereal right from the straw.  He also asked if he could have one of her picture books that he particularly loved reading, something about a prince writing a letter which tipped off a huge chain of crazy events.  I guess that one was always a favorite of his.  In one of those bizarre flip-flops, I asked if I could have a picture of hers - it was something my mother in law had given me and I gave it to grandma when we moved to Hawaii.  Now that she's moving out of state, I asked if I could have it back.  I don't know where I'm going to go with it, but it's a nice memory I have of my mother in law.

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