My family and I made our annual trek to my home town this past weekend for its community festival known as Burney Basin Days.  Held on Independence Day weekend each year, it is an opportunity for our very suburban kids to experience the charms of small town life. 

I am privileged to have been raised in Burney though it hasn’t actually been my home for many years now.  One of the wonderful things about small towns is that they change at a much slower rate than urban areas and I never tire of going back and enjoying the nostalgia Burney holds for me.  Whether it is sitting on Main Street watching the parade or enjoying the spectacular fireworks show from the football field, you can’t escape the incredible sense of community or the patriotism of the people of that mountain basin. 

I don’t know if there is a red blooded American alive who would not be moved by the experience of watching a fantastic fireworks finale to the crescendo of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It was awesome.  I always find myself hoping they will wait a few more seconds before turning on the lights so I can dry my eyes.  I’m sure there are many others on that field hoping the same thing.

Sadly, as we drove into town on Friday looking forward to enjoying all the festivities, I noticed a full sized Mexican flag being flown from a house right in the center of town on Main Street.  My heart sank at the thought of someone dishonoring our country at a time when we have all come together to celebrate all that it means to be an American.  What a slap in the face to those who have fought for the freedom that allows these traitors to live their lives on our soil under whatever banner they choose. 

The Stars and Stripes flying proudly from the tall flag pole at the town center known as “Christmas Tree Lane” and a huge flag suspended from a cable over the highway just outside of town speak to the patriotism of the majority.  However, even one who would disrespect our country and its heroes while enjoying all the benefits they fought and died for is too many. 

Burney is no stranger to heroes.  One of the earliest losses in the War on Terror was one of her sons.  Captain Matthew Bancraft piloted the KC-130 Hercules that went down in Pakistan in January of 2002.  He was the 13^th American to die in this war.  Like so many before and since, Matt believed America was worth fighting for and he was willing to give his life in her defense.

Matt graduated from Burney High School in 1990 and went off to the Naval Academy.  Though Matt wouldn’t spend much time in his home town in the years that followed, his loyalties to her ran deep.  His nickname during his military career was ‘Burney’, because like so many of us who grew up there, he was proud to be associated with this great little town.  And Burney is certainly proud to be associated with him.  Matt was my brother’s friend.  He was a son, a husband and a father.  Anyone who would fly a flag other than his flag in his town is not capable of appreciating the cost of the freedom he gave all to defend.

My grandfather passed away just 8 days before this year’s Burney Basin Days celebration.  He spent much of the last year of his life in Burney.  I certainly hope he never had to see that flag.  He was a WWII veteran - a guy who joined the Merchant Marines at just 17 because he wanted to serve this great country.  My grandfather and his entire generation knew the cost of freedom.  How repulsive that someone would fly another countries flag in a town whose freedom has been bought with so high a price.

I hope the people of Burney will band together as a community to let this family know what they think.  It was a fairly prosperous looking home – nice cars, etc.  People who obviously enjoy prosperity not common in Mexico might consider giving some allegiance to the country whose privileges they exploit. 

This may be the first time in history that a flag other than the American flag has flown on Main Street in Burney and I certainly hope it will be the last.  Today (July 4, 2007) marks the 47^th anniversary of the 50 star version of our flag and today it becomes the most enduring flag ever to preside over our great nation.  Long may it wave!

A great American died yesterday.  His greatness was not the kind they record in history books.  You won’t hear about him on the news.  His passing will go unnoticed by all but a very few. 

But his individual greatness contributed to the collective greatness of his generation and that generation made a mark on history unlike any before or since.  They paid the price for freedom and then they enjoyed the benefits of it.  They redefined the American dream and then they lived it.  Courage, devotion, hard work, self-reliance – these were their hallmarks. 

My grandfather joined the Merchant Marines when he was 17.  While the other branches of military service had a minimum age of 18, a person as young as 16 could enter the Merchant Marines.  Though it may seem a fairly safe place to spend a war, statistically it was not.  1 in 26 mariners serving aboard merchant ships in World War II died in the line of duty, suffering a greater percentage of war-related deaths than all other U.S. services.  In 1942, 33 Allied ships were sunk each week.  It took courage for a kid of 17 to go off to war, but like so many of his contemporaries, my grandfather had courage.

He met my grandmother in 1943 while home on leave.  His military service concluded in July of 1945 after 4 tours and they married on June 11, 1946.  This began a 60 year marriage that would end too soon.  When my grandmother passed away on March 26 of last year, my grandfather effectively stopped living.  His body continued to function and he went through the motions of life but he was not the same man.  She was everything to him.  He once remarked that all he wanted in this life and in the next life was to be with her.  His devotion to her was clearly evident in their life together and it did not end at her death.  Great devotion to something as worthwhile as my grandmother is perhaps the facet of his greatness most precious to me.  Great men have great devotion.

He did not have the advantage of a great education but that was of no consequence.  He had the advantage of hard work.  He apprenticed without pay while working a second job to support his family.  He learned his trade and when he had the skills he needed, he moved to small town America and started a business. 

They ran a little Montgomery Ward catalog store and provided appliance repair services in the tiny town of Hayfork, California for 30 years.  He and my grandmother always worked together and made saving for the future a priority.  They were never wealthy but they always had enough.  Like so many of their generation, they were not in the habit of spending frivolously and they lived well within their means. 

When Montgomery Wards closed all of its catalog stores in 1985, it forced my grandparents into early retirement but they were prepared.  They had enough in investments and savings to remain self-reliant through the 20 years of their retirement and there is some left over to pass on to their children.  My grandparent's work-ethic was not the selfish pursuit of wealth and power and success that we see driving so many today.  Instead they were motivated by the necessity for self-sufficiency and a desire to make things better for future generations. 

I did not have the privilege of living through the 1950s but I regard it as one of the best eras of American history.  Men of courage had come home and they were willing to work hard to realize their dreams.  They were devoted to their families, loyal to their country, and way too proud to accept a handout.  They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps as had all generations of Americans before them and they built wonderful lives.  My grandfather was one of these men.  I am very proud of his legacy.

My grandfather was a quiet, unassuming man who led a quiet, unassuming life.  A life that should be the envy of all for it was a great life lived by a great man. 

Last week we failed to celebrate a birthday in my family for the first time in 80 years.  Though I wasn’t there when we celebrated my grandmother’s first birthday 80 years ago, I can imagine the joy her family felt as they thought of the life that lay ahead of that little bundle of joy.  

 
She fulfilled her potential in many ways.  She lived the American dream as a member of a generation that made the world a better place for the generations that would follow. She came of age during World War II.  When “Johnny came marching home again” she married him.  They contributed four wonderful children to the baby boom but tragically lost one in infancy. 

They moved their young family from the bustling San Francisco Bay Area to small town America where they started their own business and ran it together until their retirement.  She was a successful homemaker and businesswoman.  They saved throughout their lives so that they could be self-reliant in their retired years.  She was a wonderful grandmother and eventually great-grandmother.  But my intention today is not to talk about all the wonderful years she was granted but about the years that were taken from her.

When we see the obituary of someone who lived to be 80, we can’t help but think that they were granted a long, full life on this planet.  There are certainly many who tragically never see 10 or 30 or 50 so why not think of making it to 80 as a great success?  But for my grandmother, 80 should not have been the end.  Her own mother died just a few years ago at the age of 96.  My grandmother was the perfect picture of health and energy throughout her well life.  She had my great-grandmother’s constitution and could have very likely lived another 15 years. 

But it isn’t just the 15 future years with her that were lost.  The last 10 years of her life saw a slow decline in quality.  For the last 5 years, her world shrank to what she could reach from the end of her couch.  She would sit there day after day doing handwork, watching TV and observing life happening around her.  In her later years, her stamina was such that she could not walk by herself to the bathroom.  This is not the way it should have been.

Today my grandfather sits heartbroken and alone without his companion of 60 years.  To him, and to the rest of us, she died too soon. 

Her killer masqueraded as a friend through most of the years of her life.  It was a friendship that was not worth the cost.  For each good year she had with cigarettes, she forfeited 6 months of living life to the fullest.  You see my grandma probably smoked for the better part of 50 years.  She started smoking as a young woman when it was a very acceptable, normal thing to do.  At that time, no one seemed to realize the cost.  As research revealed that smoking was a dangerous habit, my grandmother took notice.  She tried to quit on several occasions and often would succeed for several months or even a year, but always, she went back.  It was a hard habit to kick.

I remember well a conversation that took place one day between my younger cousin and my grandma.  Kimberly was probably around 8 or 9 and she had learned about the dangers of smoking in school.  She asked grandma one day why she smoked.  She told grandma that smoking was bad for you.  Grandma assured Kimberly that smoking was bad for you.  She explained that it was very hard to quit once you started and she hoped that none of us would ever start smoking. 

Grandma was so healthy then.  She was in her 50s and always trim and full of energy, it was hard to imagine that anything bad could ever come of her smoking.  I’m sure she figured she would beat it as well.  At the time, when we thought of smoking, we thought of lung cancer and clearly not every smoker would end up with lung cancer. 

If she had only known…  If she could have only seen Grandpa sitting alone this Christmas.  Grandma was such a strong person, if she had had a crystal ball, things would have turned out differently.  She would have done whatever it took to stop but she just didn’t believe it would end this way.

Now we know so much more about the dangers of smoking.  Today there is incontrovertible evidence that if you live long enough, smoking will kill you.  It has many ways to accomplish this including abdominal aortic aneurysm, acute myeloid leukemia, cervical cancer, kidney cancer, pancreatic cancer, pneumonia and stomach cancer.  In addition to bladder, esophageal, laryngeal, lung, oral, and throat cancers, chronic lung diseases, coronary heart and cardiovascular diseases, as well as reproductive effects and sudden infant death syndrome.  And these are just the killers.  There are plenty of other health problems associated with smoking that will just make you miserable but won’t actually kill you.

My grandmother never developed lung cancer but she did suffer from three of the killers in this list.  We will never know which of the three killed her. 

My grandmother was dealt a horrible blow early in her life when she lost her first baby to SIDS.  He had been born premature but was doing fine when he died in his sleep at 4 months of age.  I assume my grandmother was a smoker at that time.  It is impossible to say with certainty, but I can’t help but wonder if smoking may have cost us his life as well.

As I sat at the family gathering we had in my grandma’s honor, I watched my youngest cousin, now in her early 20s, out on the porch.  She was watching the rain, smoking a cigarette.  She is the third generation of smokers in my family.  This is not the legacy my grandma would have ever wanted for us.  How many more loved ones will we lose before it is over? 

My grandma forfeited 10 years of living her life the way she wanted to live it and 15 years of life itself for the 50 years she spent smoking.  The 25 years she sacrificed were not worth it.  She was a proud woman but she knew what the smoking had cost.  In the last 10 years of her life, though she had stopped smoking, she knew it was too late.  She knew it would kill her and take her away from my grandpa and all of us and I know she hated that.  I know that if she could have seen sooner what would eventually happen, she would have made it happen so differently.  I know that now that we have her life as our ‘crystal ball’, there is no better way we could honor her than to make it happen differently for us. 

To all of you who think you can’t quit smoking, you can and you should do whatever it takes.  See your doctor, spend your life savings, check yourself into a facility – there is no action so radical, no expense so great that you should not do it to save your family from the heartache of losing you.  If you don’t, you will be one of the 440,000 people who die prematurely each year just the way my grandma did.  The average man who smokes will forfeit 13.2 years of life, the average woman, 14.5.  You owe it to yourself; you owe it to your children and your grandchildren. 

My mother will experience her first motherless Christmas this year.  My grandfather his first without his life long friend and companion.  It didn’t have to be this way.  Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in this country.  It doesn’t have to be this way for you.

This is the working title of my first book.  A book, mind you, that will never be written, but I am confident that if it were, it would do moderately well in the marketplace.

In my ever increasing years on the planet, I've come to the startling realizing that there are three types of people in our culture: those who prefer to load the dishwasher, those who prefer to unload it, and that rather eccentric group that has no preference one way or the other. 

This final category can be subdivided into three sections: those who truly have no preference; those, who for lack of access to a dishwasher, have never had the opportunity to learn their preference; and those who have never washed a dish.  (For the latter, their dishwasher of choice typically has two hands and answers to either 'Mom' or 'Honey'.)

I am clearly an unloader.  As an unloader, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that some people actually prefer to have contact with the dirty dishes.  I have visions of that bowl of leftover refried beans that got shoved to the back of the refrigerator and emerged a month later.  Or that cup of rich, chocolaty Ovaltine that sat on the bookshelf for two days before it was discovered and brought to the sink.  (If you've never seen 2 day old Ovaltine, I can assure you, one experience with this bright blue curd you couldn't cut with a butter knife, and you will never buy Ovaltine again.)  Or the daily experience with the half eaten bowl of breakfast cereal.  You know the one: the little squares have grown to three times their original size, they have sucked up every ounce of liquid and are now wedged in there so tight you have to pry them loose.  These are the trials the unloader would love to avoid. 

The unloader enjoys the squeaky clean feel of the dishes that have been washed, sanitized and dried to perfection.  They enjoy the stacking process as all the bowls and cups and plates fall into their place in line so neatly and rest comfortably in the cupboard. 

Yes, I am certainly biased toward the unloader, but I know that loaders do exist.  I live with one.

Present my husband with an empty dishwasher and there is a fairly good chance he will put a dish in it.  Present him with a dishwasher full of clean dishes and I can guarantee you that the dirty dishes will stack up in the sink until such time as the dishwasher has emptied itself by virtue of demand for its contents.

A loader like my husband finds joy in organizing the dirty dishes in the sink.  He sorts them by type, stacks them by size, puts all the silverware in a glass of water and waits for the dishwasher to become available.  If more dishes arrive, he resorts, restacks and the wait continues.  I have never really experimented with this as I typically unload and reload the dishwasher myself, but I do believe that if left to himself, he would find a way to eliminate unloading altogether.  I envision this cycle of use whereby there would be enough dishes in the house that one could organize and reorganize the dirty ones long enough that every clean dish had been used and the dishwasher would be ready to go again.  The only flaw with this plan is that the dishwasher would never hold all those dishes.

On that rare occasion when my husband does unload the dishwasher, he does simply that.  He stacks all the clean dishes on the counter, ready for someone else to put away.  Creating this third step in the process seems extremely inefficient to me.  How much harder is it to go the extra two feet to the cupboard?  But to a loader, it is obviously hard enough.

I am certain that one could attach deep meaning to the preference either to load or unload and an equally deep meaning to having no preference at all.  While any deep meaning attached would probably qualify as a load in itself, there are those who would latch onto it and consider it a science. 

Along that vein, I'm taking a poll.  Why not give a minute of your time for the greater good of advancing science. (See sidebar). 

To be continued...

Brendan,

It is hard to believe you are already 7 years old.  You are such a wonderful kid with a remarkable personality. 

From the day you were born, you had a tremendous capacity to give love and receive it.  As I’ve told you many times, the night after you were born, I sent you to the hospital nursery in hopes of getting some sleep myself.  Within a very short time, the nurse returned you to me, saying you were crying because you were hungry.  The truth is, you weren’t hungry.  As soon as I laid you next to me, you settled right down and went to sleep.  You didn’t want to be in the basinet but as long as you were close to mommy, you were very content.  You were a snuggler from day one.

You also demonstrated your extremely caring nature from a very young age.  When you were 18 months old, Ivy decided that she should have the ball you were playing with.  She walked right up and grabbed it out of your hands.  Her father saw what she had done and took it from her, returning it to you.  She started to cry.  When you saw that she was upset, you walked over and gave it back to her. 

Around this time, you fell one day and hit the coffee table putting a deep gash above your eye.  We took you to the urgent care clinic for stitches.  When they give stitches to someone so small, they have to strap their arms and legs down on what is called a papoose board.  Even when you couldn’t move, you didn’t panic.  You trusted that we were taking care of you.  You didn’t cry at all as they began to stitch you up and before the doctor had finished the last stitch, you were sound asleep.  We were all amazed.  This is just one of the many times you have amazed us.

By the time you were 3, you were already a great defender of the family and righter of wrongs.  On your 3^rd birthday, you, Ivy and Alyssa were all playing in the yard at Grandpa & Grandma Ryness’ house.  Ivy decided that she wanted what Alyssa had and so she did a run by, grabbing the toy and making a quick escape.  As Alyssa stood there stunned and crying, you did a run by of your own, grabbing the toy from Ivy and returning it to Alyssa.  Already defending your big sister at 3 – what a great big brother you would make to Chase and Emily.

Your ability to show love, care for others, and your sense of justice were evidenced very early in your life and have continued past the toddler stage to make you the great kid you are today.  I hope you never lose these qualities.  They will always set you apart from your peers.

These many selfless acts at such a young age were a clear demonstration that you are far from ordinary.  God has given you a heart for others and I believe He will one day use that to accomplish great things.

I am so proud to have the privilege of being ‘mom’ to such a wonderful little boy.  I love you and I look forward to watching your unique gifts grow and mature in the years ahead.

Love,

Mom

But we can't do that.  Instead, we will take Elmer's Glue-All away from 2nd graders and hope that will somehow make us safer. It is political correctness run amuck. We can't bear that any one should suffer unjustly alone so instead we all must suffer unjustly equally.

It is the failure of history to teach the necessity of her less savory moments. Instead, we look at those times as moral failures and we fear nothing more than repeating them. We would sooner be blown to bits than repeat the injustice of racial profiling as seen in the Japanese internment camps. We prefer to give 1000s of our own sons to die on the field of battle to spare innocents who would suffer if we let the heavy artillery do the job.

Americans can't stomach war. In truth, it is possible we never could. How would we know? Never before have we brought the horrors of the battlefield into our living rooms night after night. More likely, however, our great-grandparents valued freedom more than fairness. They valued preserving the American way more than preserving the infrastructure of their enemies. They new that sometimes it was necessary to sacrifice innocent life in order to end wars and thereby save countless thousands.  We have learned all the wrong lessons from our history. Instead of repeating our victories, we choose to repeat our defeats.

We are wimps. Our enemies are not. In the battle of good against evil, it definitely helps if the good guys aren't wimps. I'm not speaking of the soldiers, of course. But of the will of the American people which dictates the actions of politicians who run the show.

My own grandmother was a wonderful woman and a great liberal. She had friends who were sent to the internment camps during WWII. She loathed the injustice of that with every fiber of her being. Like her modern day counterparts, she didn't accept that sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. I don't fault her for hating what happened - we all hate injustice - but sometimes it is a necessary evil.

Liberals tend to see the way to peace as the avoidance of war. They are right, naturally, avoiding war will lead to peace but the cost is freedom. My grandmother's generation of liberals loathed injustice but they still valued freedom enough to endure it. I don't think the liberals of this generation necessarily do.

We went down Sunday and joined a health club.  This is something out of the ordinary for us as we are not fitness minded people.  What I know about fit can be summed up in 'clothes that don't' and 'kids that do' but getting in shape was not our motivation for joining. 

Our kids just spent 2 weeks at their grandparents learning to swim and they made good progress.  They were all a little timid around the water before and so the fact that they are now willing to jump right in and swim fully submerged is significant improvement.  We wanted them to have access to a pool so they can continue to practice and improve and joining the health club seemed like a good solution.

The membership is month by month with no contract which is perfect - we can swim everyday in August and September and then walk away until next summer.  The kids love it.

Since I have this membership for the next 2 months, I decided I should take advantage of it and attempt to exercise. 

I am probably the least coordinated person on the planet.  Former attempts to exercise have included renting aerobics videos which literally leave me in the dust within the first minute.  I can't keep up, I can't do the moves, it just doesn't work so I would never dream of joining one of the many group classes they offer at the club.

I did own a treadmill for several years and I had pretty good success with it when I wanted to.  Putting one foot in front of the other was within the scope of my ability.  The only down side was that the thing was a major space hog and since I would go months at a time without touching it, I finally decided there were more efficient clothes racks I could put in my bedroom.

When I thought of using the health club, I was intrigued by the elliptical machines.  I'd never used one but I have friends who have and everyone had good things to say about them.  I went down yesterday to try one out.

I completely dreaded going in there.  I know my knit shorts circa 1991 and my oversized T-shirt were far from club chic.  In this family, the search for "fairest of them all" is a real contest.  My skin is so white, I was once stopped by a grandmother in a convenience store who came out of the blue with, "You aren't from California are you."  "A native actually, and thanks." 

Add my conspicuous appearance to my lack of coordination and complete ignorance of all things health club and you will understand why I had to force my rather introverted self every step of the way.

Of course it was a big pain on top of it.  It took forever to get all the kids ready and all the swim stuff packed.  When we got there, I checked the older ones into the Youth Center and took the little ones to the Play Center only to find they weren't registered.  I had to go back to the front desk and take care of the paperwork and all of that took half an hour but I finally arrived at the equipment room. 

When I had initially approached the front desk, I explained that this would be my first attempt at an elliptical machine and I asked if there were instructions on the machines.  The lady assured me that instructions weren't needed, you just push start and go.  Sounded simple. 

I had packed my little AM/FM radio as we were warned that you need a radio to listen to the TV. 

When I approached the room, I naturally gravitated to the side with the fewest people.  As luck would have it, the least populated side happened to be the side showing Fox News - perfect!  I selected a machine and set out to tune my radio to 88.7 as it indicated on the TV.  Well, as there is nothing simple, it took me several minutes to figure out that while my radio was switched to FM, I was looking at the numbers on the AM dial.  Finally I was hearing Tony Snow's press conference, now it was time to turn on the machine.

I pressed start.  It asked me my weight - I told it.  It asked me my age - I told it.  It asked me my fitness goal - after perusing the choices, I picked one.  After several questions, it stopped asking but nothing happened.  I've now been standing on this machine for probably 5 minutes and still I haven't moved a muscle.  I scan the machine for clues and find a little note that says, "For quick start, press quick start and start moving."  I pressed quick start, I started moving and it went. 

Within 30 seconds I knew I was in big trouble.  My knees and thighs were already burning like there was no tomorrow.  I felt like I was walking backwards but as I looked at the other ladies on elliptical machines, I determined it must just be in my head.  By the 2 minute mark, I had serious questions as to whether I would be able to walk if I went much longer.  After all the time it took me to get going, I couldn't very well hop down after 2 minutes so I pressed on and made it to five minutes.  When I got down, my legs were so shaky, I wobbled back to a treadmill. 

In my unstable condition, my radio fell.  Naturally, it deflected off the machine several times on its way to the floor to make the maximum amount of noise.  I picked it up and plugged my headphones back in.  It had lost its frequency so I started to tune it in again.  I think I was farther from the transmitter now and I couldn't for the life of me get that thing to tune in that TV.  I ended up listening to some radio station talking about MTV and its effects on our culture, then and now.  Not my first pick of stations but I couldn't mess with it anymore.

I pushed start on the treadmill - it didn't start - instead it played 20 questions.  After answering all the questions, it started.  Yeah!  I had told it I wanted to go for 15 minutes and so that is how long it went.  I think it would be altogether better if you didn't have to preselect the time as I could have gone a little longer but I figured that was enough for day 1. 

I showered, retrieved my kids and we headed to the pool.  It was an experience.  I am still very unclear as to whether I was going backwards on the elliptical.  As I watched the other machines from my vantage point on the treadmill, I began to think I may have been doing it wrong.  If anyone knows if it is possible to walk backwards on an elliptical machine, I'm very interested to find out. 

I will give the elliptical one more chance.  If it doesn’t go any better, I will settle for the treadmill.  Walking I can handle. 

My son is having a birthday later this week and so the week will revolve around preparing the house for company and getting ready for his party.  He is DS #1 and is 17 months younger than his big sister.  When she was born, I started a baby book for her and was pretty good about keeping it up for the first 6 months or so.  Then I fell behind - really behind.  So far behind that on the occasion of her fifth birthday (the baby book is called "My First Five Years") I took the opportunity to catch up by way of a letter to her I wrote in the comments section trying to summarize the 4.5 years I had skipped.

Well, if this was the treatment my first born's baby book got, you can imagine how neglected the others were.  For #2 and #3, I bought baby books before they were born but sadly, not a single entry was ever made in either.  For #4, I haven't even purchased a baby book.

Before you go thinking I'm a terrible mother, I did buy first year calendars for all of my children where I faithfully recorded every milestone of that first year.  I also have 100s of photos and though I don't scrapbook, I have all but the last 18 months worth in albums with 400 photos per album - each child has their own dedicated album and then we have a few family albums in addition. 

At any rate, I wrote a little letter to my daughter on her 5th birthday (her nick name is 'Sassa' which is how she pronounced her name when she first learned to say it) and I fully intended to do a similar letter for each of my children when they turned 5.  Needless to say, I'm a few years behind as #2 is turning 7 but I hope to get to his done before the week is out.  With this in mind, here is the letter I wrote to my daughter.  It isn't very long as their wasn't much room for comments in the book, but I am just as amazed today by the wonder of it all as I was the day we brought her home from the hospital.

My beautiful Alyssa,

This book is called "My First Five Years" and as I sit here just 10 days from your 5th birthday, I don't know where the time has gone.  Each day I am reminded of the many stages you've come through by the portraits hung throughout the house and I'm so grateful to God for allowing me to be your mother.  You have brought such joy to your dad and I from the day you were born. 

I remember well sitting in church that first Sunday, realizing that you would spend your 60th hour of life in church, and as I looked at you, I was overcome with the miracle of it all.  Tears rolled down my cheeks as I sat in awe. You were so tiny and so perfect and so beautiful and my heart overflowed with love for you as I know it always will.  I hope someday you will experience the amazement and sense of awe that only holding your first born child can bring.

When I think of your second year of life, I remember your unbridled joy.  It was so much fun watching you just bubble over as if your little body couldn't contain the happiness you felt.  Your joy was infectious and all who watched you were overcome by it.

Then I remember your third year and the amazement you displayed as you discovered new things about the world around you.  We were all amazed by how perceptive you were and how able you were becoming - like the day you figured out how to climb the cyclone fence in our front yard.

By your fourth year, you and Brendan had become great playmates and I loved to watch you two as you directed Brendan and he followed your lead.  You were so smart and beautiful and charming in a very innocent and loving way.  Many strangers told us you looked like a porcelain doll.  You were so feminine and graceful and poised.

This past year you have matured so much.  You are a little girl now who seems wise beyond your experience.  I am still amazed as I have been every day of these last 5 years by all that you've been and done and by who you are becoming. 

Through each phase of your life, I have wished I could stop the clock so that I could enjoy that phase forever only to find that the next phase was even more exciting and fun than the last.  You have been such a joy and I will never forget the many wonderful moments of these last 5 years.

       

    When I was little, there was nothing I looked forward to more than going to Grandpa and Grandma’s house.  My cousin, Toby, and I were great pals and we loved exploring Grandma’s big walk-in closet or finding adventure in the somewhat untamed yard. 

    I’m sure if I returned to that house today, I would be shocked at how small it actually is.  In my memory, it was a big place with plenty of room to roam both inside and out. 

    It had a huge kitchen that was connected to the hall by an archway.  Grandma chose that archway as the spot to chart our growth.  Each time we would come, she would mark our height on the wall and note who was taller.  (I can’t help but wonder if Toby may have repressed that memory.  In those days, I was typically the taller of the two which was made all the worse by the fact that I was 9 months his junior and a girl.)  I remember how amazed I was that Grandma would write directly on the wall as a permanent monument to our progress.  But Grandma knew something that I didn’t - that a good coat of paint would be all it would take to make that wall like new again.  She also knew something we mom’s tend to forget, that the memories made it childhood are far more important and last far longer than a few marks on a wall. 

    It is obvious, looking back, that all those happy memories were no accident.  They were born of careful planning and sacrifice.  I can imagine the organizational nightmare we left behind each time she gave us free reign of her walk-in closet but she didn’t seem to mind the inconvenience. 

    As we got older and were no longer content to explore, she made sure she had the latest big kid toys to keep us entertained.  Grandma had video games when they were still a novelty and as the technology advanced, we could always be sure that the console at Grandma’s house would be at least one generation newer than the one at home. 

    She was also the perfect hostess.  While this is a hard quality to quantify, she had a special way of making everyone who ever walked through her door feel at home.  She was a fantastic cook, always finding delicious new recipes to add to her already ample holiday spreads.  She was also skilled with just about every kind of crafting needle ever invented, creating dozens of heirloom quality pieces which will passed down for generations to come.

    From the carefully orchestrated experiences of childhood, to the dozens of picture perfect Holiday celebrations, to the hundreds of heirlooms she produced over the years, Grandma was truly the master architect of fond memories.  I will always love her, I will always be grateful, and I will always remember.