We had a great weekend celebrating Easter. Jason took the day off Friday and we spent the day running errands and playing and dying eggs. I even managed to sneak away for a bit to get a mani/pedi.
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Jason and I took Peyton to see Frozen on Ice a few weeks ago. It was so fun to watch her take it all in. She was fascinated with it all and loved every minute! We had more fun watching her than the show!
I had my 20 week ultrasound today and it went well! It was great to see the baby and hear that it's healthy. We stuck with our decision not to find out the sex which was a little hard at the time but I think it will be such a fun surprise during the birth. Since we aren't having any kind of gender reveal like we did with the other two kids, I thought I'd put the Old Wives tales here and see what they say. For the record, I'm thinking girl.
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Today we said goodbye to Jason's Grandma Griesenauer aka GG. Although she lived a full and wonderful 88 years it's never easy to lose a loved one. The past two days have been full of family and friends sharing memories and tears and it was a wonderful celebration of her life by those who loved her most. Shortly after Jason learned of his grandma's passing he opened his laptop and began jotting down thoughts. What started as a stream of random thoughts soon turned into a beautiful eulogy. As Jason stood up in church today and spoke of his grandma, I couldn't have been more proud of him. His words captured what she meant to her family perfectly and evoked both tears and laughter. I asked Jason if I could share his words here and he agreed.
I started thinking about giving a eulogy for my Grandma on Monday and
quickly had more material than I knew what to do with. Virginia
Griesenauer was a woman who lived a full, interesting life. She grew up
an only child in Augusta, MO. She converted to Catholicism before
marrying my grandfather and proceeded to maintain a strong faith. She
attended Washington University. She loved sports with favorite teams in
virtually every sport, including the Wallace brothers from NASCAR. She
and my grandfather loved to put together huge puzzles with thousands of
pieces. She collected spoons that were acquired from trips that spanned
the globe. Having grown up during the Depression, she kept seemingly
everything and knew the story behind every item. Holidays, from
Christmas to Halloween, were an excuse to get everyone together,
decorate her house with as many decorations as Kmart offered, guess how
many pieces of candy were in a jar, give every grandkid some kind of
present, and generally just enjoy life together.
Grandma
was very smart and had a wry quick wit that balanced the goofy sense of
humor that my Grandpa had. As the years went on her already porous
filter virtually vanished, which made for some very enlightening and
entertaining conversations.
There’s a lot there (I
didn’t even list half of it) and I could have gone in many directions
but one memory stood out to me, perhaps because it was my earliest. My
earliest memory of my Grandma was walking, hand in hand, on a Saturday
morning back to the Farmer’s market that she and my Grandpa set up a
stand at every week. She had purchased me a pennant for the 1987
National League Champions. This simple memory stood out to me because of
what it symbolizes.
My grandma was generous in many
ways. She gave each grand kid waaaay too many Christmas gifts, spent
countless hours at our activities, offered up her time and her home at
every chance, and probably more than anything was generous with her
words. Grandma could talk for days if you’d let her. I, for one, enjoyed
it to no end. Her stories were detailed and entertaining. She seemingly
had a memory that could forget no nuance, emotion, or participant.
Combine a steel-trap memory and her sheer joy of talking, and a family
news wire and historian was born.
She taught her
grandchildren the history of our parents. I learned more about my dad,
aunts, and uncles from these stories than 30 years of conversations with
the actual people. Without her stories, I may have never learned that
my Uncle Randy nearly blew his hands off with fireworks or that he and
my Dad used to shoot arrows into the sky and run like crazy to avoid
being hit. I also wouldn’t know that she and Amy received their
driver’s licenses at the same time…my Grandma was 50 at the time but
that’s beside the point. Every visit called for a new story and for a
retelling of at least a few other stories.
I came to
realize that, as much as she liked to talk, she liked to listen even
more. I think her storytelling was part of a barter system. She’d offer
you an amusing story about something your parents had done in exchange
for you sharing what was going on in your life. She wanted more than
anything to be connected with her family and to keep us all as close as
possible. She was the family glue. She wanted to do the little things to
make us happy and to keep us connected. She loved us and we loved her.
