It is with GRAND excitement that I share the GRANDest news of all!
Our son, Jake, and Daughter-in-Law, Colleen are expecting a baby!
Which means hubby and I are rocking into GRANDparenthood!
The GRANDest handmade GRANDparent Card – custom made by Jill
We could not be more GRANDly excited and happy!
You may remember my bestie Jill’s daughter just had a baby a month ago – the first McHendy GRANDbaby….
Ben and “McHendy GRANDma” Jodi
Well – now Baby Ben is going to have a McHendy GRAND brother or sister!
And Jill made this GRAND rockin’ card, which she and Todd gave to Marty and I this weekend to go with a GRAND rocking chair for our front porch to rock our new GRANDbaby!
The Happy GRANDpap-to-be, Marty
We went out to dinner to celebrate, and they surprised us with this chair right in the restaurant parking lot! (We sure have the GRANDest of friends!)
So if you haven’t figured out, I am GRANDly excited!
My Grandma was the greatest role model in my life, and I feel she has prepared me to be a GRAND Grandma. If I can be only a fraction to our new GRANDbaby of what she was to me, it will be my GRANDest honor.
I wonder if my boys (or maybe my grandchildren if I am blessed with them someday) will have something of mine that will bring as sweet of memories as Grandpap’s Rocking Chair does for me?
Do you have any thing(s) like that?
This beautiful chair, that grandma refinished and varnished to a S-H-I-N-E, is now safely preserved in one of our guest bedrooms, but oh the memories it evokes of evenings spent on Grandpap’s lap watching his favorite show together – Lawrence Welk.
I’m surely showing my 51 years of age. Who else remembers: “Uh oneah and uh twouh and a three…. ?” as good ole’ Lawrence swung his magical musical baton….
or the polkas, the accordians, the singers, and the dancers.
What shows will our children and grandchildren remember like that?
The Housewives of New Jersey?
The Bachelorette?
Yikes!
Grandpap was a very gifted musician. Oh if I only would have gleaned even a drop of that talent, but despite a stint at clarinet lessons, and even shorter stint of piano lessons, and don’t even ask me to sing (even though I love to 🙂 ), it is lost on me.
Grandpap died when I was only 10 years old, but I smile thinking of him. I can vividly picture him shaving his 5 o’clock shadow in the deliberate and methodical way he did twice every day with his bristly lathery brush in the basement sink…
I can still hear him saying, “Grandma’s gonna gimme the dickens!” every time he took us to Kerber’s Dairy and bought us double dipped ice cream cones taller than we were, which he helped keep from dripping all over the car by taking turns licking around my brother, Johnny’s, and mine one after the other, but we still ended up dripping it all over ourselves…
And I can still taste the Coffee Soup he so loved that was made out of saltine crackers and coffee with lots of cream.
Another very treasured item I have, but one I DO USE – probably EVERY single day – is Grandma’s tin measuring cup.
Of all her treasures we divided up when she died, I longed to have this and her recipes the most.
Marty has even had to repair this by re-securing the handle, but I love how it allows me to fondly remember her when I measure a cup of rice for dinner or a cup of flour when baking.
What tangible things will our children and grandchildren hold dear that evoke such fond memories of us?
The sweetest ones usually come from the simplest of things we don’t even realize….
the creative life in between 