dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with family stuff

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Just now I was in Farmsister’s kitchen talking to farm-BIL, and I laughed and went through the door to the hallway. Upstairs, my niece Farmkid heard my voice and shrieked, “Grandma’s here!” and came joyfully stampeding to the top of the stairs, and then was disappointed to see it was only me.

😂 I do have the same voice and laugh as my mother. She sees Grandma all the time and me relatively rarely, but I guess it says great things about her relationship with Grandma that she was so excited.

We’re going over to Grandma’s in an hour or so probably, once I get dressed and they hit a pause point in their playing. (My older sister’s daughter is staying here for the duration of the visit, so that there’s room for older sister, her husband, and both sons in my mom’s house. In past visits that brother-in-law has had to sleep on the daybed in the back room, which is– well, not super restful, as that’s not really a bedroom… but Other Niece is now old enough to be perfectly comfortable away from her mom overnight, and Farmkid is old enough to behave herself at a sleepover.)

Yesterday Older Sister’s family drove up from Maryland (various testing and quarantine protocols have been followed, don’t worry) and came directly to the farm. The older son recently spent all his Christmas and birthday money on a 3-D printer. He knows that Farmkid has always been his biggest fan, and is a kind enough child to know that it’s to his benefit to encourage this. So he came in the door amidst all the hullabaloo of all of the arrival (with the family’s two Springer Spaniels, it’s never not a great deal of hullabaloo), and said “Ah! [Farmkid], I made you something!” and with a flourish, he produced a 3D-printed replica of Luna Lovegood’s wand from the movies– he pulled it out of his sleeve very nonchalant-dramatically and handed it over to Farmkid, who was ecstatic.

Very smooth, Oldest Nephew, very smooth. he is at that age where he is basically a person, but then the teenager slouches out and you have to walk away for a minute. (He’s just 13.)

oh I hear the girls making an enormous mess, I should probably poke my head out and see like. what’s. happening. here. orrrrrrrrrr….. no, I’d better see. (Your picture was not posted)

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Actually, for being uhhh 67 or so, my mom is doing generally fine. A chronic tendon problem in one ankle, other minor issues that mean she has a regular orthopedist she goes to, but overall doing just fine, so I won’t complain in general.

But this morning she suddenly had such terrible back pain that she had to have Dad bring her to the emergency room. Where they sort of looked at her, and were like, oh you didn’t do anything to cause this? Huh and sent her home with a muscle relaxant. So of course she immediately called her ortho, who was like oh yeah come on down to our next available appointment… mmm… two weeks from now.

Yeah.

So she’s laid up for the moment, and I’m sure Dad’s taking care of her, but well, she does all the food wrangling in that house. Middle-Little has already volunteered to bring them takeout tonight, and I’m sure there are leftovers in the fridge for a day or so, but after that, well.

I’ll be in town but without a car, so if she needs more help than that, well– I mean, Dad’s not an infant, and is currently doing just fine healthwise (better than any other 75-year-olds of my aquaintance!), but it would be a major adjustment for him to have to do more than some pretty basic cooking. He knew how before they got married, but Mom doesn’t like people messing around in her kitchen, so he’s just left it to her for uhhhhh 42 years, and if she doesn’t tell him what to eat in a meal he’ll often just skip it.

Mom of course has a million things to do and is mad about being laid up, and has already texted me fretting that she’s on assignment to cook several things for turkey slaughter this weekend. So, likely I will be stepping in to do that, which is fine– that’s the sort of thing I wind up being in charge of. Actually the dynamic winds up being that I go see to Farmkid and then my sister does the extra cooking, but we’ll see how that works out. I hope Mom recovers quickly but who even knows, since we don’t have a cause. Sometimes these things happen but that doesn’t mean they’ll clear up on their own…

Sighhhh one last day at work. I’m spending it shooting and editing photos of used equipment for my coworker to list, but I also rearranged some of the backlog of the stuff I’ve done that for, and found a box of expensive Hasselblad antiques that I shot and edited literally six months ago that he hasn’t got to, so it’s hard to feel like my work’s really… necessary, here. But, whatever; it’s all he wants me to do today so it’s what I’m going to do. Even if that means I’ll have to reshoot it all in February after he can’t find the photos anymore.

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I have three sisters so a while back Mom started a group text that included all of us. An exciting upgrade was a couple years ago when my father finally got his own smartphone, after years of having all his input filtered through Mom. So now the family groupchat is the four daughters, Mom, and Dad. Normally it’s used to send photos of the various niblings doing Significant Stuff around, but occasionally we get something great like the youngest niece posing artistically in front of Dad’s latest demolition project.

[Image description: small blonde girl in bright cheerful clothing strikes a coy, vampy pose leaning against a garbage can in front of a mostly-demolished cinder block building full of neat piles of junk.]

(One could almost imagine she’d done this with the power of her mind, knowing her.)

Anyhow, yesterday Dad sent a photo, which I will decline to share here, of a gloriously majestic enormous wolf spider sitting on the wainscoting in the kitchen, next to the kitchen bookshelf. “Spring has arrived. A visitor to our kitchen this morning. Mom at first thought it was one of the toy bugs, but it’s just looking up Easter recipes in the cook books.”

Various of us reacted in different ways, and I went on with my life after doing my part (looking up the spider’s Latin classification to verify it was the species I’d thought), and it was a bit later that my youngest sister got to the message.

She wrote asking if they’d set him a place at the dinner table.

In the meantime, my mind had gone a very long distance from this chat, and I had been discussing Passover seders with someone, so I immediately assumed this was someone talking about, of course, the Prophet Elijah, so I had to go poke the notification to figure out why my sister of all people was chiming in on Passover commentary (we are Catholic by upbringing, so).

It took me some backtracking to figure out she was talking about the spider.

I made a joke about it in the family groupchat but I’m the only one in the family who knows anything about Passover so it went unappreciated, so I’m sharing the setup here at least where someone might be amused.

I AM A DELIGHT also, in looking up wolf spiders, I discovered that they are not in fact signs of spring; they live more than one year, so this glorious specimen likely overwintered somewhere. Then I got distressed, to Dude, wondering where spiders GO in the winter and DON’T THEY GET COLD. He was like, uh they’re fine, don’t freak out. But a part of me wants to knit tiny spider sweaters, so let’s be glad I never learned to knit.
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I have three sisters so a while back Mom started a group text that included all of us. An exciting upgrade was a couple years ago when my father finally got his own smartphone, after years of having all his input filtered through Mom. So now the family groupchat is the four daughters, Mom, and Dad. Normally it’s used to send photos of the various niblings doing Significant Stuff around, but occasionally we get something great like the youngest niece posing artistically in front of Dad’s latest demolition project.

[Image description: small blonde girl in bright cheerful clothing strikes a coy, vampy pose leaning against a garbage can in front of a mostly-demolished cinder block building full of neat piles of junk.]

(One could almost imagine she’d done this with the power of her mind, knowing her.)

Anyhow, yesterday Dad sent a photo, which I will decline to share here, of a gloriously majestic enormous wolf spider sitting on the wainscoting in the kitchen, next to the kitchen bookshelf. “Spring has arrived. A visitor to our kitchen this morning. Mom at first thought it was one of the toy bugs, but it’s just looking up Easter recipes in the cook books.”

Various of us reacted in different ways, and I went on with my life after doing my part (looking up the spider’s Latin classification to verify it was the species I’d thought), and it was a bit later that my youngest sister got to the message.

She wrote asking if they’d set him a place at the dinner table.

In the meantime, my mind had gone a very long distance from this chat, and I had been discussing Passover seders with someone, so I immediately assumed this was someone talking about, of course, the Prophet Elijah, so I had to go poke the notification to figure out why my sister of all people was chiming in on Passover commentary (we are Catholic by upbringing, so).

It took me some backtracking to figure out she was talking about the spider.

I made a joke about it in the family groupchat but I’m the only one in the family who knows anything about Passover so it went unappreciated, so I’m sharing the setup here at least where someone might be amused.

I AM A DELIGHT also, in looking up wolf spiders, I discovered that they are not in fact signs of spring; they live more than one year, so this glorious specimen likely overwintered somewhere. Then I got distressed, to Dude, wondering where spiders GO in the winter and DON’T THEY GET COLD. He was like, uh they’re fine, don’t freak out. But a part of me wants to knit tiny spider sweaters, so let’s be glad I never learned to knit.
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Middle-Little just said, sort of out of the blue, with a little huff of a laugh, “Mom and Dad have a Roku.” She shook her head. “They’re growing up so fast.”
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One of my nieces is three. She has an alter ego named Puppy. Sometimes she is herself, and sometimes she is Puppy. Puppy speaks only by yelling “Bark!”, and crawls on all fours, and pants and licks people.

Puppy, she has specified, is also a girl, like she is. She refers to herself in the third person when she is Puppy, however, and she uses masculine pronouns.

On the one hand, she is three. Her command of spoken language is imperfect.

On the other hand, she keeps reiterating it, so she seems pretty dedicated to these pronouns.

I just thought it was a funny point. We’ve made it a little talking point, or I have anyway, with the kids, about using preferred pronouns and it being about what makes the person being addressed feel right, and it doesn’t cost anything to respect their preferences. It’s mostly been cute and amusing.

If only these things could always be like that. My mother has always had a sort of whatever makes them happy, don’t crush their self-expression kind of attitude toward children, and it would be nice if that were more widespread in the world, and also applied to adults a little bit more…