The Latest.... And a Family Dance.

Well the big news here is that my stepmother has passed.  It happened much sooner than we all had thought it would.  She had been working feverishly on a sewing project for each of her grandchildren.  She was always sentimental with her crafts.  She'd cross stitch something when you got married, another item when you had your babies with their names and weights at birth, a baptismal book mark comes when a child turns 8.  This last project isn't a cross stitch.  It is for the temple and cannot be mentioned publicly due to it's sacred nature.  It's very nice of her to do for the grandkids.  I have one from her from when I went through the temple as a young adult.  They are a lot of work!  Especially when you consider that with her natural grandchildren and her step grand kids the numbers are up in the 70s.  So I heard that she finished the last one on Tuesday, took a physical nose-dive on Wednesday, and passed away on Thursday in her sleep.  I am so grateful that she wasn't in a painful awful state for long.  My mother who died of cancer 21 years ago hovered in that state for way too long and it was awful for everyone.

So I am off to Utah for about 5 days to go to her funeral.  It will be nice to see everyone.  Nice to see the mountains and feel the dry heat.  I am coming to grips with my feelings about this loss though.  Like I have said on the blog before, JoAnn and I had our ups and downs.  Most of them downs, but overall I am trying to see the good side that she did have.  The problem was that anything good was always salted with her many criticisms.  Her own mother once told me that her biggest problem was her tendency to criticize.  Even in her last phone call to me (and we had had some really sweet last conversations) but during the last one, she said something mean about my brother's family.  She was most critical of them.  Sigh!  It will be weird to be there with her real kids and trying to figure out what to say or not say to them.  I better work on something mentally before I see them.  "Sorry for your loss" makes it sound like it's not my loss too.  Maybe just "sorry"  or "how are you holding up?"  They all have to speak, so I don't envy them there.

On to something else- We had a very nice Father's Day yesterday despite the fact that our older two boys had just come home from New York for youth conference and had gotten home at 1:00am due to a flat tire on the bus.  Then they had to turn around and leave for scout camp early the very next morning (on Father's Day!  Hello planners... stop ruining Father's Day for the 3rd year running please!).  So T and I were very tired on Sunday falling asleep during our meetings.  We noticed a lot of folks ditching church to go home and sleep.  Nice!  And why didn't I think of that sneaky idea?  We had a new member who moved in over for Sunday dinner.  He will be here all alone until his family joins him in a month or so.  Sounds like he may have a cute daughter for Middle Boy and a son for Little Boy as well.  For a friend that is : )  I don't even care if he's cute.

After our guest left the kids did some Father's Day performances for Dad.  There was piano playing and poor singing, piano pounding by Little Girl with her so sweetly announcing what song she'd be pounding out next "This one's called 'I Love Dogs'" she'd say, then pound away.  We also heard the tunes 'I Love Cats', 'I Love Flowers', and the ever popular hit 'Let's Make a Bunk Bed'.  Still, the bunk bed making day sneaks it's way into our daily lives in one way or another.  During the dance portion of the show a most funny event happened and was compounded by drama when we all thought Little Girl had hurt herself by tripping over littered shoes.  Instead of crying she made an excellent save of her fall and with pointed toes in the air proclaimed through body language that she meant to do that.

Yeah, families are awesome.... The End.