Gram’s Birthday Celebration

We had plans to get together with my family to celebrate Gram’s birthday on Sunday, so we started our preparations on Saturday. Eli made a card for his Great Gram, and also opted to stamp his FACE when I left him alone for five minutes with my stamps and ink.

Here’s his creation. Eli asked Ben if he liked his card better or his face? That gave us a good laugh because Eli was obviously proud of how he had decorated his face with stamps and purple ink.

Apparently Eli has a thing for decorating faces, because he took it upon himself the next day to draw on Charlie’s face with black marker. Charlie looked like he had war paint on!

We decided to leave it on his face until my family arrived, so they could see Eli’s creation in person.

Poor Charlie.

We washed his face soon after everyone arrived. Thank goodness for washable markers. Here’s Charlie, looking much cleaner:

Here’s Gram looking at Eli’s paper creation. You’ll also notice that there is a Spiderman card in the left side of the picture – Eli picked that out to give to Great Gram. When you open the card, it says, “Happy Birthday Superhero!” Eli wanted to sleep with the card last night—that is how much he loved it. I told him sleeping with it had the potential to wreck the card, so we compromised by setting it up on his bookshelf while he slept. I’m impressed Eli actually gave Gram the card (because he seemed extremely attached to it).

Here are 86 candles on her cake, since we always do an extra candle – one to grow on.

That is a LOT of candles to blow out!! It took her six puffs.

Charlie was in this daze after all the candles were blown out – the smoke was pretty captivating.

Here’s Gram opening gifts. She always ties the bows on her head for a little extra pizazz :)

Thank you for your kind, sweet, uplifting words in the previous blog post about my Gram. They meant so much to me. She has a PET scan tomorrow and then meets with the surgeon on Tuesday (her actual birthday) to go over the scan results and schedule a surgery date. I had mixed emotions tonight as I realized this is probably the last time we’ll all be together before her surgery, and it may be a long time before things seem somewhat back to normal, if they ever do?

I HATE cancer. I know it from a child’s perspective, since Davey had leukemia when he was 4 and I was 8. When I was a teenager, my aunt died from breast cancer. And as an adult, I’ve had some friends survive cancer and one lose the battle. It’s never easy, always full of ups and downs. It horrible to have someone you love so dearly face something so difficult. Part of me is still in total denial that this is really happening since Gram is an otherwise healthy, vibrant woman.

Enough of my frustration though. Life keeps going. We’ll keep praying for her and I hope you do too.

I gave Gram this soft pink bathrobe and my mom coordinated with getting her some pink slippers. We thought this would make her upcoming stay in the hospital more comfortable.

Here are some more photos from the evening:

Eli was on potty accident #3 of the day, so he was wearing turtle pj bottoms with his sweater :)

Both boys with their Great Gram -

Davey and Gram (her license plate says DVSGRAM)-