Shingles and Weddings and Death Glare, Oh My

“Death Glare has long been proven ineffective on mothers.” ~ Me

I don’t even remember where I left off blogging last year, and I suppose I could get online and check, but that might involve getting distracted by other people’s awesome blogs, and I’m determined to finish a blog this week. It can in no way be complete, as way too much has happened. But things can be recorded and noted for posterity. I’m afraid it will be quite long. Consider yourself duly warned.

Last year (2009) was a whirlwind year. Sarah had a bout with the shingles last spring, which affected her eye and she was in the hospital for over a week and on about ten different meds afterwards, most of them different eye drops and ointments. Miraculously, there was no lasting damage to her eyesight, and although she has occasional nerve headaches that will probably recur for the rest of her life, the doctor thinks it very unlikely that she’ll ever contract shingles again. She’s been very involved with Varsity Tennis and with her artwork. She also worked for Mayde Creek Animal Clinic again this last summer. She graduates in June and will attend BYU Idaho next January, after spending some time staying with my brother John and his family this summer, and spending a couple of months in Brazil like both her sisters have before her. She is looking forward to getting out on her own, but will miss the many friends she has made here.

Brittany and Christian Mealey got married in June in the Jordan River Temple. It is wonderful to see them so happy together; it truly was a marriage of best friends and they have so much love for each other and take care of one another very well. Her colors were pastel lilacs, mauves, and light greens. There was a DJ at the reception, a barbershop quartet of Mealey men at the open house, blue skies and summer weather. In the temple, Jim cried loudly on Brittany’s shoulder, one of the very few times I’ve ever seen him cry.

Mary brought Derek Mecham, a returned missionary from Idaho, to Brittany’s wedding, and when we saw the two of them together, we knew they would be next, and we would be planning another wedding very soon (P.S. attending a family wedding with a date with no fear, including videotaping family, setting up open house tables, and washing punch bowls is a sure sign of a male not afraid of commitment, quite possibly a dying breed in today‘s society…single females, be envious). It was also a bad sign for Dad’s wallet, which suffered greatly in 2009. Derek and Mary married 6 months later, December 23rd in the Rexburg, Idaho temple. Derek’s grandfather was their sealer in the temple. Mary’s colors were bright red, orange, and yellow, a bright contrast to the snow outside. The bridesmaids wore ¾ length red sweaters. They had a waterfall backdrop at the reception, chicken filled cream puff shells, and several different kinds of cake, made by the bakery where Mary made many many cookies her last semester at BYU-I. The weather for this wedding was cold (just above freezing, an unseasonably warm day for Rexburg) with snow on the ground and a sprinkling of it in the air, gently falling on Mary‘s outdoor bridal cape, quite the change from the June wedding but just as beautiful, and again, Jim cried louder than anyone else there. It was interesting to see a bit more of Idaho. P.S. only in Idaho do they consider “The Russets” to be a serious mascot name. MASH THE RUSSETS!!! P.P.S. How do potatoes fight back? All they have is eyes… “Potato Death Glare to the (um…) Panthers!!!“? I’m sure THAT will give everyone scary dreams and noone will want to see potatoes ever again. Not.

We had planned a fun Christmas day in Utah staying at my brother‘s house, followed by a relaxing week just hanging out with family, but it ended up being a rather somber Christmas morning. Shortly after opening our gifts, we got a call telling us Jim‘s mother Lydia had passed away during the night. She had struggled for many years with diabetes, high blood pressure, and ulcers, and had suffered quite a few strokes/ministrokes. I guess we thought that she would just stay around forever, but the struggle I guess was too much. Jim rushed home on the next flight available on Christmas Day, and we followed soon after. She is very much missed. She had been my partner for many years playing 42, which is a Texas domino game involving trumps and bidding. We always played women against the men, she and I against Jim and his father. Their style of playing was to bid on absolutely any kind of hand (a classic quote from Jim’s father after winning the bid with a high number, “Now what should I make trumps???”). Lydia and I had a different style of playing called Put the Men in the Hole. We would take so many points that they couldn’t make their bid. The game being what it is with the clear advantage to the bidding team, they usually won. But we held our own, and we won our fair share of games, marked with a large ALL on the score sheet. One day, we won two sets of 7 games by a large majority. Lydia kept the score sheet in their box of dominoes so we could gloat every time we took out the dominoes to play. When Jim and his father were going through her things, he asked if I wanted anything of hers. I can’t wear her clothes because she was a little petite English woman, and we don’t have the same taste in reading material. But I did ask for one thing. That piece of paper in the domino box with the two ALLS and the boldly underscored title WOMEN!! in her writing. That’s all I wanted.

Jim told a story at the funeral. Jim’s father and mother found out they would be raising their grandson Josh (Jim’s brother’s boy) in 1989. At the time, Josh was just a baby, had an addiction to the drugs his mother had been taking during the pregnancy, and was a bit colicky. Lydia was having some major medical issues and nearly died in the hospital soon after they took the baby in. Jim’s father Jim senior knew he couldn’t raise the baby alone. He prayed fervently that the Lord would spare Lydia and that she would be healthy enough to raise Josh to the point where he was stable and independent. Then, he told the Lord, if he needed to take her, he could. She made it. Joshua, age 20 at the time of the funeral, has a steady and supportive girlfriend of 2 years, and is working and no longer living at home. I guess the Lord decided she had been through enough hospital stays, ups and downs, and medications, and finally took her home. For the third time in 2009, Jim cried loudly. This time it was a different kind of tears.

When Danny returned to Webelo scouts in January, he found that his scout leaders, a couple who for many years had been unsuccessful in trying to conceive, had adopted a baby. They didn’t know Jim’s mother, or that she had passed away. But they had chosen for this lovely tiny baby girl the name Lydia. It was a miraculous comfort to me.

Derek (who is about to graduate in Marketing) has spent the last 3 months doing an internship at SCI here in Houston, and he and Mary have been staying in an apartment in the Memorial Park area. It’s been great to get to know him better. Mary met him at BYU Idaho far away from where we live, so it was a little difficult to bring him home to meet us. She’s made up for it by coming to Sunday dinner each week they’ve been in Houston. We eat, talk, and play games. They came for conference and Easter dinner this past week, and brought some amazing brownies for dessert. They are leaving soon to go back to Idaho and we will miss them a lot. Derek and Mary are very different, but they complement each other and each brings out the best in the other. Derek really likes cars, and he likes all the dealerships here, as well as all the car shows, and he’s fallen in love with the palms that grow like crazy around here. He’s going to try to grow a palm in Idaho. We’ll see how it does in the cold. We are hoping that one or both couples choose to accept jobs in Texas after they complete college. We’d love to have them and any future grandchildren (hint hint) in our general vicinity.

Stephen started high school this last fall, and the most remarkable change in him has been how he has grown. He is now at least 6 feet tall, making him the tallest in our immediate family, and although we bought him a new suit and shoes for each successive wedding, he’s grown out of both sets. He looks down at all of us, and as my friend Christine (who has 4 older boys) would say, the “juice (what she calls the male hormones)” has hit. The juice is characterized by spurts of anger and independence, a few more things accidentally broken and the occasional death glare when I ask him to do things. Unfortunately for him, death glare has long been proven ineffective on mothers. I try very hard to avoid making calm comments that his face might freeze that way. Usually, however, the death glare is short-lived, and he is usually very willing to move big plant pots and reach things down from high shelves from me when I ask him too. He enjoys playing soccer and recently has had a fascination with nerf gun wars and with learning new pieces on the piano and keyboard for fun. He also goes to lots of campouts and merit badge fairs as he continues to progress in his scouting. He has discovered how much he likesTabasco sauce and puts in on everything (Mom, we need some more Tabasco sauce). He had a tiny bottle of it that he took to school in his backpack to put on his lunch, and one day he was bored in class and poured some into his hand and licked it off. Another boy asked what it was and he said “drugs” (Tabasco, Stephen’s drug of choice), and the boy decided he wanted some too. Stephen let him try some and the boy soon ran frantically out of the room to find a drinking fountain.

Danny has really enjoyed 5th grade so far. He ran for student council representative in his class and won. He attends his early morning student council meetings regularly and without complaining and takes his responsibilities seriously. Danny has stuck with the piano and is starting to enjoy it more. He has discovered jazz and latin rhythms and has a bit of a flair for them. His recital piece for May is called “A Little Salsa, Please”, and he already has all but three chords memorized. He reads like a fiend (do fiends read?) and has a great vocabulary. I always said that reading a lot makes you a great speller and it must be true, because Danny was the runner-up in his elementary school spelling bee. It went back and forth at the end between him and a girl. He lost on the word “ardent”, which I don’t think he had ever seen before. What kind of word is that to give a 10 year old boy anyhow? I think he surprised himself that he did so well, because there were a lot of kids in the spelling bee. He was awarded with a large illustrated hardcover Scholastic junior dictionary, which he is very proud of and actually looks words up in. He also won the pinewood derby for the second year in a row, with a wedge-shaped car that he modeled after his last years’ car. He raced the two together before the races, and when he saw the new car beat out the old one he got excited. When it came time for the Blue and Gold banquet, it was birthday themed. He got serious about his cake design and flipped through several books before finding a cake he liked in an old Wilton catalogue I had saved. The cake was a rabbit emerging from a black top hat with a miniature birthday cake in his hand. It was a challenging cake to decorate, and we learned that if you try to make chocolate frosting black with black food coloring (which is, by the way, not REALLY black but bluish greenish blackish), it turns, well, poop color. It took quite a bit of additional dark chocolate to make it look edible again. Getting the miniature cake to balance ended up being easy, but getting the bunny cookie to stand up without threatening to collapse off the cake from the weight of the frosting was worrisome. We ended up with a major framework of large popsicle sticks behind the cookie for support, and it held. Hurray!  We wouldn't have wanted the bunny to die.  (Although we did get this great game for Christmas called, "Killer Bunnies".)  Those who think that was a hint to certain recently married couples are probably right. 

Over Spring Break we went camping at Double Lake.  Leslie (my niece) came with us.  Here's a couple of pictures for you.

"Cajun Marshmallows"

 "It Came from the Lake"

Jim and I realized that we’ve been in our ward now nearly 20 years. We were musing one day about how when we first came, there were so many older couples in the ward. Now, it seems, it’s all young couples with sweet babies and toddlers. Where in the world are all the old people. Then we realized that…wait a second… WE are the old people now. Sigh. It must be because I’m getting old that I appreciate the little things. The mockingbird singing on the stop sign at the end of the street, the flowers Pat and I have just planted in the yard and in the pots at the end of the driveway that have settled in and are blooming gloriously, Danny chatting happily as we walk to school each morning, eating cheesy hash brown casserole at Easter dinner, conference talks clearly meant just for me, and the fact that the patio cover is now replaced with pressure treated wood, and the carpenter bees that had feasted and nested in the rotten wood of the old structure for years and years (unresponsive to poisons, wasp spray, bleach, plugs in their holes, or electric shock) now buzz along the edge looking for their old holes or an easy place to burrow, and then (finding none) fly off into the clear blue sky, to someone else’s house. My apologies in advance to my neighbors.

P.S. Remember, death glare won’t work on me.