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)-

Springtime

This month, Eli has turned into a child who can be VERY strong willed and stubborn. He insists on taking his shoes off when he’s playing in the back yard (and often takes his jacket off, as shown in the picture below), despite the fact that our yard is FAR from perfect (more like completely imperfect and our neighbor’s grass is absolutely beautiful and I wish I knew the secret – it really is greener on the other side :) and has all kinds of bumpy, rough spots in the grass and the dirt. But… he throws fits and goes ballistic when we ask him to put the shoes and jacket back on… sometimes I just give up and figure he’ll realize it’s cold and uncomfortable soon enough (which he usually does and throws another fit because he’s so cold).

At the same time, here is Charlie, much more bundled up and appropriately dressed for the weather because he’s too young to have a choice in the matter. It was in the 50s and steadily dropping.

Ben was happy it was Friday and time for the weekend.

However, I realized I was way too happy it was almost springtime, because I left the sand table box open and all of our bikes and outdoor toys out in the yard, all of which were covered in snow when we woke up on Saturday morning. Bummer.

Thankfully, most of the snow has melted and we’re back to the 50s this week. I’ll take that over snow any day!

Teary Day

I just got off the phone with my Gram. She found out this morning that she has an advanced form of cancer, based in a tumor in her neck. This afternoon she went on with life and went to the DMV to renew her driver’s license that was about to expire. When I called, I asked her how the driving test went.

“It went well! I wore my green wig [for St. Patrick’s Day – Gram is Irish] and the guy who was going to give me my driving test was looking at me waiting in my car and kept whispering to the other employees. When he got in the car, I took off the wig and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he had to get back out of the car to tell the guys that it was just a wig, because they were worried I wouldn’t be able to get my picture taken for the license with green hair.”

Gotta leave it to my nearly 85-year-old Gram to wear a green wig on St. Patrick’s Day :)

I asked her how she was feeling about everything else, and she responded, “It was a bad day, but everyone’s entitled to a bad day every once in a while.”

Oh Gram. I’m not envious of what you have ahead of you. The surgeon will remove the mass on her neck, the sub mandibular gland and possibly part of her jaw. Then she’ll have radiation and who knows what else.

I had a busy morning, hosting playgroup at my house that lasted later than it usually does, which was great. It was nice to have the distractions of friends around and the first part of the day passed pretty fast. Our weather today was beautiful and we spent so much time outside.

But by about 4 p.m., the heavy reality of what is to come with Gram hit me pretty hard. I got lots of sweet, concerned looks and comments from Eli. He kept coming up to me and touching my face, saying “I see a little tear” in his soft voice and wiping it away. Charlie offered lots of big kisses with lots of snuggles. Little kids are very in tune with our feelings, happy or sad.

My Gram is tough. And strong. And one of the most amazing examples to me of someone who lives life with passion, loves others and is a friend to many. She has lived near me almost my entire life, and during many of my younger years, she shared a 2-flat with my family and lived above us. Gram took me on all kinds of trips as I grew up – to Tennessee, Alaska, London, and Prague. We’ve have lots of good memories. And I’m always her personal travel agent when she wants to go visit a friend or relative, finding her good deals and booking her flights. My boys love their Great Gram and Eli has been singing her songs every day since she came over for a visit last week.

Now that I’ve had a good cry and my head feels like it’s going to explode, I am going to focus on doing what I can to help Gram stay positive and feel hopeful for the future. Especially since she turns 85 next Tuesday. We’ll make it a good birthday, despite everything she is about to face.

Love you Gram.

Heard at the Paper Source

Today is one of those rare, extremely long days when Ben went to work at 6:30 a.m. and is STILL out. Tonight he’s out to dinner at a fancy Chicago restaurant with work people while I sit at home in my pjs (spouses are never invited, of course). I just called him to make sure he was still alive (the dinner started at 6:30 p.m. – it’s now 11 p.m.) and he said he would head home soon. Wonderful.

So… to break up the day a little, this evening I took the boys out and picked up my favorite cheeseless pizza from Homemade Pizza and made our regular visit to the Paper Source. While we were in there, Eli picked up one of the toys and carried it around, a Sound Machine with 16 sound effects such as laughter, applause, burping, etc. (most of the sounds aren’t great – I wouldn’t recommend buying this)

Eli pushed one of the buttons that sounded like a woman screaming, kind of like a horror movie scream, and he said loudly but sincerely,

“That sounds like Mama!”

Ohhhhh the Paper Source employees were laughing so hard. I was a tiny bit mortified, but it was pretty funny. I racked my brain to think back to why he might think a woman screaming sounds like me, since I swear I’m not the yelling type. But I realized that when the boys are driving me absolutely crazy, when they’re both crying or yelling or throwing fits and it’s 5 p.m. and I want to cover my ears, I do sometimes just let out an “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

Kind of like the sound machine scream.

Oh boy.