Been Here, Done This – Sort Of





Well, it’s this happy grandma’s 3rd day at staying with my three Pennsylvania grandchildren while their parents are away. I’m taking care of my 7 and 6 year old grandsons and 1 year old granddaughter, along with their dog. I got here Monday afternoon and my son and his wife will be home tomorrow afternoon. All I can say is – How did I do this 23 years ago? I guess the quick answer to that would be - Because it was 23 years ago! While that’s partially true, there is so much more to it.

For the last couple of days I’ve been comparing this experience with that of being a young mother with two sons also 16 months apart. As I got the two boys ready for school this morning, and they were outside waiting for the bus, I just had this flashback of my own two sons. It was a deja vu moment! But when my boys were young and I was a young mother, I was also working as an insurance agent and owner of my own agency. I was extremely busy, but I didn’t really think about it. I guess as a young woman and mother you just take for granted the fortune and joys and stress and hardships that you live. I didn’t think about how difficult being a working mother was. My husband and I were (and are) partners in business and in life and we ”just did it”! I also sat on several local boards, worked out (as in exercised) quite a bit, worked in my office at least 40 hours a week, and did everything possible with my boys. They were in wrestling, cross country, track, and of course all the academic functions and events. My husband and I were very involved parents and I don’t think we ever missed an event. To think back and remember all this now is overwhelming to me. If I had to do all that now I think I would curl up in a fetal position and cry!

So I’ve been thinking about this. Why do I feel so overwhelmed by this now when I obviously am very capable of handling it. And I’ve come to a conclusion and an answer: I’ve already done that and now my prize to myself is, I don’t have to do it anymore! Back then it was just what my life was. It was the plan and the progression and now I’m on to Part Two.

As I wrote about in my article, “Design Your Life to be What You Want”, we make the life we have. Whether consciously or unconsciously. The choices we make at each step determines the following step. We all have the ability to choose the direction of that track. Yes, unforseen events can derail us, but it’s then up to us to get it back on track.

Now, back to the present. The track I’m on now is to be a good and loving and very happy grandma. I am very willing to be the caregiver for temporary time periods, but I would not want to do this again full time. In addion to the boys, I also have their one year old sister, little Leanna.

Needless to say, I am busy and tired this week. If I HAD to do this full time due to some unforseen event, yes I could. This is not my current plan or track. I adore these beautiful grandchildren and want them to remember me as a good and loving grandma. When I leave here tomorrow evening and go back home to my husband, my house and my current normal every day activities, I’ll be so appreciative of it all.

I can look back and remember the first part of my life and appreciate how the hard work has paid off and gave me what I have now in my second half. I can also greatly appreciate that now in Part Two I have gorgeous grandchildren that I have the good fortune to spend time with. Then I get to go back to my well deserved current life that is now more about doing for me instead of a full time life of doing for others. And I don’t feel guilty for that at all!

I'm also at:  http://over50andhappy.com.  Would love to visit with you over there, too!

Lost Grandma!

This is me lately!  I've been doing a lot of computer work the past couple of weeks; business and an on-line class.  Unfortunately the fun things, such as my blog, gets put on the back burner.  A friend sent me this and I got such a laugh out of it, because I felt like it described me.  I wanted to share because I'm sure many of you can relate:  ENJOY!

The computer swallowed grandma (me). Yes, honestly it's true She (I) pressed 'control' and 'enter'  And disappeared from view. It devoured her (me) completely, The thought just makes me squirm. She (I)must have caught a virus  Or been eaten by a worm. I've searched through the recycle bin  And files of every kind;  I've even used the Internet,  But nothing did I find. In desperation, I asked Google My searches to refine. The reply from him was negative,  Not a thing was found 'online.' So, if inside your 'In-box,'  Grandma you should see,    Please "Copy,Scan and Paste" her (me)  And send her back to me.(this way) This is is a tribute to all the Grandmas who have been fearless. . And learned to use the Computer.......  They are the greatest!!!  We do not stop playing because we grow old;  We grow old because we stop playing ....  NEVER Be The First To Get Old!

Heart of the Home at Christmas

The Heart of the Home is always the kitchen.  This is especially true at Christmas time.  I'm in this room it seems like all day.  I've purposely set it up that way.  I get a lot done because I have everything at my fingertips in one room.

 My kitchen is large, but it is very warm and cozy at the same time. The cherry cabinets and the wood floor helps to give it that feel.   I'm definitely not a minimalist when it comes to my home and decorating.  I love to have all my "stuff" around me. There's my little TV on the left side of the counter.  As Hubby says, I'm a TV person.  Most of the time it's just background noise while I'm working.  Sometimes I will turn it onto a Christmas music station. 

 Every once in a while I force myself to get rid of some things or at least put some in storage or I can get a cluttered look going on.

I like to have little lamps next to my work areas, rather than turning on the big overhead lights.  It just feels more homey that way. 

Notice my "Grandma" sign.  My DIL gave that to me after her grandmother passed away a few years ago.  This had hung in her house and my DIL always liked it and wanted me to have it now.  It reads:  "Grandma's Babysitting Service

Little people always welcome.  Service includes: meals, lessons, entertainment and lots of hugs.

Tender loving care for your most precious possessions."

It fits!

This is the other end of my kitchen.  It's an eating area/breakfast nook/my office.  

Little Fergie and Ellie Mae hang out with me here.

My antique desk houses my computer and all my office supplies.  I also have a small file cabinet that also is my printer stand. I'm my husband's assistant, blog writer, and Etsy shop manager right from this little corner. It can get rather messy, but I try to clean and straighten it all up by 5:00, shut down the computer and close the desk.  Then it's back to full time kitchen and time to prepare dinner.

I don't have a lot of Christmas decorations in the kitchen, but there are a few.  I have to always have the mistletoe in the doorway and my Christmas card rack.

So now when you read my blog, you can picture in your mind where I'm sitting and downloading pictures and typing, while Christmas music plays in the background and my dogs lay in their beds next to me.  

Thanks for stopping by!

I'm linking up to Cielo's party.

Show Off Your Cottage Monday

My Cozy Little Sewing Room

Today is Monday, which means it's time to show off your cottage.  This is hosted by Cielo at The house in the roses.  Follow this link to see all the beautiful rooms and cottages:

Show off Your Cottage Monday

This is the door to my cozy little sewing room.  This picture I found in an antique store just reminded me of how I feel in my room.  Like a little girl playing with her toys!

This is where you will find me almost every night, sitting in my favorite chair with knitting or sewing in my hands.  I had this chair and ottoman made a few years ago.  I had been wanting this chair with these fabrics I picked out for a long time.  I also ordered extra fabric and was able to make some throw pillows to match.  The pillow on the left is one I made doing a faux chenille sewing technique made of flannel.  And if you can notice the crocheted doily on the back of the chair, that was made many years ago by my great grandfather.

My dogs hang out on the couch as long as I'm in that room.  The couch is quite old.  It was my grandmother's and my boys used to take naps on it at her house when they were little boys.  It's in excellent condition and has so many memories for me and I also like the small size of it.  I had a white slipcover on it but I just got tired of messing with it.  The quilt on the back was the very first full size quilt that I ever made about ten years ago, and a few more throw pillows that I made for the dogs to cozy up with.  The little end table was found at Cracker Barrel by my mother about five years ago.  I should have taken a close up picture of it because it has the prettiest roses and ribbons decorating it. 

My little TV sits on top of a repurposed old sewing machine bottom made into a stand.  The top was brown but I painted it white, as I did with every piece of furniture and trim in the room.  The scarf under the TV is a gift from Germany given to me by my mother when she was living there for a while.  The table under the mirror was a credenza in my old dining room and it was also a light oak wood.  My husband put the legs on for me to make it the right height for me to stand at and cut fabric and iron.  Again, I painted with a white wash, then stenciled lace on the drawers and glued on cloth covered buttons and hearts.  This little room is so jam packed that it's hard to even point out every little thing in there.  I made most of the wall hangings, the collection of pin cushions on the TV stand, and the framed mini quilt on top of the TV.  All the baskets on the floor are filled with either yarn or fabric.  The closet is also filled, but I won't even go there!  I try to keep it as organized as I can, but this is all stuff I need.  And I love just sitting there amongst it all.  Uh Oh! does this sound like a hoarding issue?

 

The sewing machine is from 1970 and was my grandmother's.  It also started out brown, sort of Early American style and came with a Singer sewing machine.  I used this old machine of hers until just a few years ago when I finally got a new Janome.  Here's the original owner's manual that came with the cabinet and machine and this is exactly what it looked like.

And you guessed it!  I painted it white with pink and green trim.  Then I sanded spots to give it a more shabby look.  The cover on the chair came from Sure-Fit slipcovers.

I just didn't know when to stop and stenciled the roses on top of the cabinet. 

I made the curtain, but they did not originally start out at curtains.  It was a quilt top that I had never made into a quilt and I needed curtains, so I cut the quilt in half, sewed a backing to them, made a rod pocket and they worked out perfect.  But then after I hung them I thought they didn't quite look frilly enough, so I hung lace behind them that hangs down beneath.  

Everything on the little white shelf is stuff I've made.  More pincushions and miniature pillows.  I also made that mini little quilt hanging under the clock.  It's a quilt of a sewing machine.  Oh, and notice the lamp shade on the right.  I made that, too.

These are some miniature quilts that I have made.  I  have thought about selling them, but I would have to ask so much for them that I doubt anyone would buy.  Besides that, they take me so long to make that I hate the though of parting with them.  I'll have to show more on these in a different post.

My mother and I also do counted cross stitching and she made this for me.  Isn't it just perfect?

I made this wreath many years ago, incorporating things I like into it.  It's maybe a little cheesy, but I love how I feel when I look at it.

So that's my cozy little sewing room.  It's not very big, and there's a lot crammed in there, but when I'm in there I just feel like I'm wrapped up in one big comfy quilt.  I hope you enjoyed seeing it as much as I enjoy being in it!

Goodbye, Grandma

My Grandma, passed away Friday, March 12

Lenora Mable Logan Bechtel, my Grandma, the strongest woman I’ve ever known, all 5 foot, 105 pounds of her. Even at half that weight in her last days, her strength was still seen. No one could understand how anyone that small could hang on so long. How did she do it?


Grandma was a petite, gentle, soft spoken lady, but she ruled her roost, in a loving but strong way that only she could get away with. She was definitely the matriarch of our family.

Grandma was a sister for 93 years, a wife for almost 74 years, a mother for almost 73 years, a grandmother for 52 years, a great grandmother for 29 years, and a great great grandmother for 5-1/2 years. She was my role model, and if I live as long as she did I will still not be able to achieve the perfection that she was in these roles.

As long as I can remember she was always the perfect grandma. She was caring and loving and I loved going to Grandma’s perfect house to visit. She would make the simplest of lunches for me that only she could prepare in just her own perfect way, not only the way her food tasted but her presentation. Simple but elegant. Austin reminded me last night how she would cut up an apple for he and Brandon and serve it to them in a little dish with little cocktail forks to eat it with. She was that way in every thing she did. I wanted to be just like her.

When I moved to DuBois as a new, young wife, I watched the relationship of a more mature marriage of about 43 years between Grandma and Grandpa. At that point I couldn’t relate. They didn’t fight, they did everything together, they didn’t travel much anymore and they went to the mall every Tuesday night and ate dinner at Valley Dairy. I thought, “How boring”. Why don’t they go somewhere? Why don’t they go out more often with friends? Why don’t they go to a movie, or go to New Year’s Eve parties? How boring their life is. But guess what? As my marriage is coming up on 31 years and I now have a marriage closer to the 43 year mark than newlywed, I understand, admire, and look at the 73 year marriage of Grandma and Grandpa as the guide to live by. If only Bob would listen as well to me as Grandpa listened to Grandma.

Then I had children of my own. My grandma now became a great grandma. Again, the perfect great grandma. Since I worked, she helped raise my young active boys. I know now that I took this a little for granted. She was so good at it and made it look so easy. My boys always behaved so much better for her than for me. And even when they spent a whole day or a whole weekend with her, Grandma’s house still remained clean and perfect. How did she do it?

And now that I have grandchildren of my own and I have two grandsons that come to visit and spend a day or a weekend, I say even louder in my head, “how did Grandma do it?” I now know and understand the love she had for her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. But I don’t know how she did it all with such perfection and ease.

And all of us here know how beautiful Grandma always looked. She took such good care of herself, inside and out. She was healthy, ate well, stayed slim, and liked to take walks. She died of old age, with no disease in her body. She didn’t smoke and enjoyed only a glass of wine every once in a while. When she would come to my house for dinner or to celebrate a holiday or a birthday, she would always sit in my kitchen while I prepared dinner and I would pour us each a glass of wine and we would talk. If I asked Grandpa if he would like a glass of wine she would say, “Oh, he doesn’t need that”. So in later years, when my boys were adults, they would sneak him glasses of wine when Grandma wasn’t looking.

Grandma dressed beautifully and loved buying clothes. As a young girl, I remember her always taking me with her to the old PT store. She really missed that store when it went out. Then JC Penney became her new haunt. If she wasn’t buying new clothes in the mall store while Grandpa sat on a bench in front of the store talking to everyone he knew, then she was scouring the catalog for every size 6 petite that she could find. I always remember Grandma wearing beautiful blouses, with a blazer sporting a different brooch or pin on the collar of each and every one. And she never missed a week of getting her hair done. Even up to the last week of her life.

Anyone that had ever been in Grandma’s house knows how perfect and clean it was. Still according to Grandma’s style of simple and elegant. Again, I don’t know how she did it. She would buy new carpeting about every five years and the old carpeting still looked brand new. She would dust every single morning. She would tell us women in the family that if you dusted every day then your house would never get dusty! You couldn’t argue with that. A funny story that shows how meticulous she was: In Grandma’s later years she developed macular degeneration and her eyesight got worse and worse to the point that she really couldn’t see much at all. But yet Mom and I would be amazed at how she could keep her house so clean. Mom and I were younger and a little more physically fit (not much) and we had good eyesight, but we never felt like our houses ever came close to being as clean and perfect as Grandma’s. How did she do it? Well, one day my dad stopped over at Grandma and Grandpa’s and noticed cheerios all over the dining room floor and he asked Grandma what happened. He assumed Grandpa had maybe dropped the box of cheerios. But Grandma said that she was vacuuming and that was how she could tell where she had already run the vacuum. If she couldn’t hear the pinging of the cereal being sucked up into the vacuum then she knew that area was clean. See, there is just no excuse according to Grandma.

Grandma was and is my role model, as my mother and Jane told me she was for them, too. She was the perfect wife, mother, and grandmother. She was what I strive to be. Even if I live another 40 years I know I can never achieve her perfection. Lenora Mabel Logan Bechtel, my Grandma, was a breed of woman that unfortunately doesn’t exist much any more. And that’s a shame. Her quiet strength, her beauty, her love and her presence will be truly missed. I am just lucky that she was my Grandma.

Update During Rough Times

I'm so glad the sun is shining today.  It looks so pretty on the lake.  It really helps.  This has certainly been a very rough few weeks.  I just wanted to give a quick update to stay in touch.  I'll write more later when I feel like it and have more time.
As you know from my last post, we lost My Bob's mother on March 2.  We spent that week in Cincinnati.  When we returned home, my dad said that my Grandma wasn't doing well at all.  She's been bad for quite a while now.  She's been in the assisted living and then nursing home for three years.  Dad explained that she looked worse.  I went to visit her and she didn't even open her eyes and looked even thinner than the 53 pounds I had seen her at previously, if that's even possible.  We contacted relatives to tell of her worsened condition.  My cousin, Brad, got into town from Harrisburg on Friday to visit her, and just as he got into town she passed away, at age 93.  The viewing and funeral is this coming Friday and Saturday. 
Going on at this same time, last Thursday my mother went into the hospital for a scheduled hysterectomy operation.  She was in there until Saturday afternoon.  I've been helping her with a few things such as some laundry and cleaning out Grandma's things from the nursing home yesterday. 
Also during this time we are arguing with, fighting with, and appealing the zoning board's decision to not allow a flower shop to go into the property that my son and his wife own that we are trying to sell.  (See my February 12 post).  We thought this was a done deal, and it should have been.  The female attorney bitch (and I don't say that often) City Solicitor decided she wanted to fight us on this for no good reason.  Why do female attorneys feel they have to be like this in order to feel like they are being an effective attorney?  She loves the thrill of a good fight and good common sense doesn't even enter her mind.  Now Bob and I are going to see an attorney on Thursday to see if we have a case for appeal.  The attorney we have been recommended to is the County Solicitor.  It's become a matter of principle for us now.  My energy is running low, though, so if it's not going to be an easy win for our family I'll have to give up.
Then last Thursday I think it was, our computers quit working.  I guess the timing was as good as it could get because I didn't feel like using it anyway.  Our computer doctor came to the house and it ended up we needed a new router.  He also cleaned up the computers and ordered new memory boards for both.  We're back in business again.
Today I need to do laundry and get sheets, bedrooms and bathrooms cleaned up and ready for family arriving Friday for the funeral. 
After this weekend we'll be looking forward to a nice summer and two new lives that will be coming into our family.  We have lost two wonderful ladies and will be now welcoming two new beautiful grandchildren. 
I must go now and put all I have into the rest of this week.  I'm behind in so many things, but I can only do what I can do.