Levedy

Nana, Jen, Jennifer

I found this picture of me and my Nana. Jennifer (the statue, not me) is hanging on the wall behind us:

*Snigger*

I was clearing out spam comments that have accumulated on old posts when I discovered an abundance of dildo and vibrator ads had stacked up under the "Looking for Input" post.

Jennifer and Scarves

Yesterday my sister and I spent the afternoon with our Aunt. She treated us to lunch and took us to my grandmother’s house to see what trinkets, furniture, and kitchen stuff we would like to have. It was an incredibly awkward experience, poking through my Nana’s things, feeling selfish and awful whenever I said “I’d like to have that, if it’s okay.”

Death is the shits for the people who are left alive. Aside from the grief, the clearing out and distribution of stuff is horrible. I hate it.

The most important things that I wanted to keep to remind me of Nana aren’t particularly valuable. There’s a wood and plaster wall hanging of a girl, a girl that I rather modestly named Jennifer in my early childhood, that Nana’s decorators hung in her old townhouse back in the 70’s. That townhouse was SWANK, man. It had yellow shag carpeting and yellow and silver wallpaper. Jennifer hung at the top of the stairs, and I loved seeing her every time I went to visit. Nana was never very attached to it herself, when talking about it, she’d shrug and say “Oh, the decorators picked that out,” as if it somehow didn’t count as hers. But she kept it, and moved it with her to her newer townhouse. She developed a real love of decorating in her last year or two, and her home changed paint colors, wall hangings, and decorations often. But Jennifer stayed. Jennifer, which she didn’t much care about, and which doesn’t really match anything in her house anymore, hung around, I’m sure only because she knew that I loved it so much.

There’s a day bed that Nana bought when she moved in the hopes that she would have overnight guests often (read: grandkids). It was used as a couch often enough, but not really as a bed until her illness made it such that she needed someone there for her 24 hours a day. Bean will need a twin bed in about a year, so it’s a matter of practicality rather than sentimentality that we take that and store it for the Bean.

I also took home Nana’s scarves. I remember playing with her scarves as a girl. My cousins and I would tie them end to end and use them to fling stuffed animals over the second floor railing, giggling when they would swing like pendulums from a long length of silk and polyester. They aren’t the same scarves that I played with as a girl; Nana was constantly updating her wardrobe and donating old stuff to the Assistance League. The scarves of my girlhood got rotated out like unwanted kids on a dodge ball team. The scarves that remain, though, are still like Nana: stylish, colorful, and well kept. I took them home hoping that the Bean would like to play with them as I did.

I miss my Nana. It’s strange and sad to walk into her house and not have her there. It’s horrible to have to put my name on her furniture and her lamps in the hopes that I get to take them home after a while. And, oh, the awkwardness of wanting something that someone else wants, too! I want this to be over. I want it to be three years from now already when I can be past this stage and think about this without feeling teary and angry and awkward and sad at the same time. I’ll be the one flinging scarves over the railing with Bean. I think Nana would like that.

Overheard while web surfing

(distressed) Meeeeowwwww

Be niiiice to Ruby. That's it. Niiiice.

(still more ditressed) Meeeeyyyowwwwlll.

Nice, I said. Be nice.

(Shocked) Yow!

Oh, no. DON'T TOUCH HER BUTTHOLE! NO! NOT HER BUTTHOLE!

Sad

My Nana's gone, and I am very sad.

Mother's Day

Mother’s day was lovely. Thanks to those of you who sent me cards. Bean got me a flower from church. The church was handing out orchids for kids to give to their mothers, and Bean only ate some of it. She came home with a few squished petals for me. They were the BEST MOTHERS DAY PRESENTS EVAR.

And where was I? I was at home, getting dinner ready for 11 people. I had a big dinner for all of our mothers (and Andrea, Sophie’s best friend who is a mother but not my mother, but her kid is in France right now, so we pretended to be her kids so she could have a card and dinner.) We also had Bean’s godmother, an incredibly lovely women whom I want my husband to marry if I die. She's just going to have to take one for the team.

We had a big spaghetti dinner using Kat’s mom’s lasagna sauce recipe (which is awesome, by the way). I went to bed with a headache but didn’t think much about it until the morning, when I felt like I wanted to die.

I spent the first part of the morning miserable, since my GI tract was doing things to me that hadn’t been done since I was pregnant. My mom came over for a few hours to watch the Bean while I wallowed and slept.

I feel better now. I think that I was just dehydrated from running around all day and night yesterday.

Good thing I have a mom who can drop everything so I can hurl in peace. Thanks, mom.

Stupid Effing Cupcakes

Bean and Earen's Birthday BBQ went okay. No one set themselves on fire, except for my father, who singed off all of the hair on his right arm.

We had 25 or 30 people, and the kids were pretty well behaved. I gave them sidewalk chalk to entertain themselves with in the backyard, which made Dimitri chafe, but kept the kids from getting too ornery. It was fun to see my friends and to feed people, two things I enjoy doing, even if it does get stressful en masse.

I was incredibly ill, and had a sore throat that left me sounding like Eartha Kitt after twelve cigars. My dad and mom kept ordering me to sit down and rest, but I had guests, guests whose mouths needed to be filled and guests who needed to be mingled with.

The food was good, and the cupcakes I made tasted relatively good, considering that I had to remake the strawberry batch three times. I burnt the first, messed up the frosting on the second, and aced the third.

Here are pictures: (popup)
Finished Cupcakes
Cupcake with mama
Cupcake with daddy
Bean and her godmother
Earen pre-chomp

More pictures here: Flickr