Wyatt and the Bunny Town

Wyatt really is delighted with my Bunny Town and Bunny Tree. He was more than happy to pose with them, since he isn't allowed to touch them otherwise.

Another page about Andrea

I made this page using a kit I get from Paperworks. This month was nice and springy which is what I am ready for. I actually did a variation of their page. It just appealed to me, and here it is.

Nel Gerdes

This is my mother Nel Gerdes in 1976. She is holding my nephew Brian McConnell who was about four days old at the time. My mom was an interesting person. She was a war bride from Brisbane, Australia. She married my dad, and packed up all she owned and moved to the other side of the world to a farm in Oklahoma to make a new life. She was smart and funny. I didn't appreciate that when I was younger, we had the prickly mother/daughter relationship one has with a mother than you are very much like. However, after I became an adult, I grew to appreciate what a great mom she was. Ray and I could go to her for advise and she would give us intelligent and considered options. I have tried to model my relationship with my daughter and her husband on what my mom did.

My mom would have been ninety years old today. Unfortunately, she died of a rare form of brain cancer twenty one years ago. It seems like forever, and no time at all. I miss her, there have been so many times I would have liked to ask her what to do. She has done something right, I take the time and think what she would have said and go from there.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Andi's Pages

I am working on getting Andrea's album up to date. I don't want her to suffer from the second child syndrome and not have any pictures of when she was little. The top page is from when she was six months old, Nicole and I put her on the bed and took pictures. I used paper from the Basic Grey Kioshi kit. The bottom page is her first tooth. I used paper from a Nana's Nursery stack I bought when she was born. Once I started looking at photos, I found I wasn't that far behind after all.

Old Friends are good friends.

This lady is Candy Rains Timpanelli. We have known each other since the seventh grade. That is a long time. We haven't seen each other for over twenty years, that is a long time too. However, not too long ago I found Candy's name on Facebook and took the big step of asking her to be a friend. Asking people to be your friend on Facebook is sort of a big step for me. After all, what if they were to say, "Huh? Who is this?" I wouldn't really care but some little part of me would be hurt. This is still high school after all.

Anyway, Candy and I met for breakfast this morning and it was like all meetings of friends. After the first few minutes, it was like we had seen each other just a week ago. That is what friends are. I am hoping we can get together before she leaves to go home again.

A page about my Grandkids

What else? Last Thursday before it snowed again on Friday was a perfect spring day. Ray and I went over to park with the kids. Wyatt drives his jeep and Andrea is his happy passenger. When we got to the park, both kids had a lot of fun climbing the stairs, going down the slides and being pushed in the swings. This page is for Andrea's album. We have a couple of similar pages of Wyatt at the same age in his album. Now that the weather is getting nicer, we are going to be going to the park on a regular basis.

It's My Birthday....

and we had a lot of fun. We ate at Gobi Grill, and had Coldstone Creamery ice cream cupcakes. I could eat those all day long. But if I did, it would be misery on my diet. Ray gave me a yoga mat and a digital scale, which is in direct contradiction to my lust for high fat ice cream. We won't have another birthday till May when Nicole has her birthday.

Chocolate Cake and Orange Juice

Andrea likes Chocolate cake, and then swigged down the orange juice. I don't know how she does it, but she does.

The Old Man just got older

Yesterday was Ray's 66th birthday. We tend to be very low key on our birthdays anymore. However, Wyatt was having nothing of that. According to Wyatt, birthdays require pizza and birthday cake. So that is what we did. Wyatt also decreed birthday streamers, the best we could come up with was the Happy New Years banner. Since Wyatt can't read, he thought it said Happy Birthday and we weren't about to tell him otherwise. We both loved the enthusiasm Wyatt brought to the day.

Canvas Photo Layout

I made this canvas for a class at Scrapbook Garden in May. The kit is from Quick Quotes and is surprisingly simple for such an elegant looking end result. It uses patterned paper, chipboard embellishments and brown chalk ink. I am going to make more of these, one about Ray's parents and maybe more colorful ones for Wyatt and Andrea.

Pauline Vivian Brown 1924 to 2010

My mother-in-law Pauline passed away yesterday about noon. She was eighty six years old and had been failing for the last couple of years. She and her husband Wales had five children, Ray is the second child. Pauline was born in Stilwell Oklahoma in 1924. Her family was like most of the people in the area at the time quite poor. It was and is a matter of pride to the family that the Ross's were direct descendents of John Ross the principal chief who led the Cherokee to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.

Pauline and Wales were married July 10, 1941 in Stilwell. Wales was a mechanic, and like most women at the time, Pauline stayed home and raised the children. She said that when she and Wales got married all they had was $11.00 and a trunk. Both of them only had an eighth grade education. Over the years they were to the point of being comfortable, but no more than that. They worked hard all their lives. In 1950, they moved to western Kansas and lived in several small towns, the longest in Montezuma where Ray went to school. During that time Pauline became a CNA and worked in a nursing home, and later as a home companion. In 1985, she and Wales returned to Oklahoma, first to Broken Arrow, then back to Stilwell. My father in law died in 1989 and Pauline remained in Stilwell.

Despite her limited education, Pauline was interested in many things. She loved to travel. When we were in the Air Force, she would come visit us whenever it was possible. It was a disappointment to her not to be able to visit us when we lived in Turkey. She wanted to go on a cruise with us, but by that time she was not up to the trip. She was active in her church and the Stilwell Senior Center. She loved visiting with her many relations in town. For a while, she had been a "Granny" at the Maryetta grade school near her home in Stilwell.

Many people have told her children, how much fun and how they liked being around their mother. Pauline loved social gatherings and parties. She organized family reunions and made sure everything she wanted happened.

Right now, I don't know what I feel. I am sad, and I know that I will miss her. She has been a part of my life for forty five years. But Pauline lived a long and good life. She had all the highs and lows one has to face. Now she is with Jesus and that is just where she wants to be.

The Wait

My mother in law Pauline is dying. The doctor has placed her on comfort care only and it will be just a matter of time until she passes away. The family is making preparations which always feels strange. We did it when my mother died, but it seems so premeditated. However, we are working on things that will make her memorial service more meaningful. It might be difficult to do that after she passes and we have to deal with with her being gone.

Pauline has been declining for a long time, and I don't know how Ray and his brothers and sister will react when she passes. They have a complicated but not dysfunctional relationship with her. I don't know how I will react. Right now, I am in that waiting state, subdued, maybe a little sad, but not grieving. I know I will miss Pauline, she has been my mother in law for forty three years and I have known her for forty five years. It has been sad to watch her lose the ability to do all the things she enjoyed. But in heaven, all pain, weaknesses and suffering are gone, and everyone is whole and happy again.

Cruise pages

This layout is the starting point of my cruise story. I like the bright colors and the glittered patterned paper from Best Creations fits the Caribbean theme perfectly. I used thoughts and quotes from Ray and Wyatt to summarize how we enjoyed the cruise. I added the medal I got for winning the Camp Carnival Twist contest because I wouldn't want to leave that out at all. After all, for me to win any sort of dance contest is a miracle. However, I was the only contestant there who was old enough to have danced the twist when it was popular the first time around.