12 Monday Sep 2011
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Fooled you! I know what you were thinking!
Actually, my friend Amy asked me to take pictures of her in this, her last month of pregnancy. The light last night as the sun went down over the bay was perfect! We had fun together chatting and laughing and her sweet daughter Isabelle got in on the action. Here are a couple previews for Amy.
10 Monday Aug 2009
I got permission from Hannah to post these. I wasn’t sure since she’s getting to that point that we all get to before the baby comes, no pictures please, and for crying out loud, don’t tell me how big I am!!! I still think she looks adorable. She looks like she’s sitting in a chair with a beachball on her lap!
03 Monday Aug 2009
Nora is growing like crazy, and Hannah is feeling the heat these days. You know it’s getting closer to delivery date when I can call Caleb and say, “hey we’re in town, can we swing by so I can take a picture of Hannah?” before he can repeat my question to Hannah I hear her in the background, “sure”. Like it’s perfectly normal for me to call just to ask if I can come over and take a picture of my daughter-in-law.
22 Wednesday Jul 2009
Posted in Family, Life Learned, People
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Last Sunday my SIL (that’s internet-chat-short for Sister in Law) threw a baby shower for Hannah. It was beautiful and lovely as you could see by the pictures in the previous post. Someone asked me on facebook if I’d done all that. Right before or after someone else commented on how Martha Stewart the shower looked. I had to laugh. In the Atkins family, Laura IS Martha Stewart, and I am more…Erma Bombeck. If you are too young to know who that is, Google it.
Seriously, I would have thrown some streamers about, blown up a balloon or two, dumped chips in a bowl and called it a baby shower. Not Laura. She is the dream SIL. If you are an Erma, pray you marry into a family with a Martha. Because there will be birthday parties, Christmas’s, weddings, showers of every sort, and thanksgivings for decades to come, and chips in a bowl will not cut it!!! (and if you are a Martha, please, look for the precious few gifts that Erma’s have and give her lots of praise, because she’s very insecure!)
All that aside, (that is not what this post is about) I have been feeling very nostalgic.
I mentioned earlier that I have some of my folk’s photos. Dad has found the rest, which Matt and Laura (abovementionedSIL) will be bringing back to Bellingham after their fun-fill vaca to Bend, and I am in the mood to go back to my roots and dig up old memories and make up the ones I can’t seem to find.
AND…as everyone knows, we are about to become Grandparents. Tomorrow night is another shower for Hannah. Her Aunt Catherine is throwing this one for the Johnson side of the family. Hannah’s mom Cindy is one of 15 kids, so this will be a fun party! In going through some old baby things that people made for my kids when they were born, I came across some blankets that had belonged at one time to my FIL (that’s father-in-law in interne….you know) and I had one of those weird flash-backs.
When I was getting ready for Caleb to come into this world Rick’s mom gave me a blanket that was so worn and tattered, Rick’s Grandma covered it and bound it with new cloth so it could be passed down. Suddenly it was yesterday, 24 years ago, when I was hearing the story about Grandma Mildred making sure each of her Grandson’s (2 of whom weren’t even married yet) had blankets for their babies before she died.
When Caleb was born, my own Grandma Tate, who is still living, going on 96 years old (am I right Mom?) decided she wanted to make him a baby blanket. Her daughter, my late aunt Donna Mae taught her to crochet so she could do just that. She was 72 and learned to crochet! And I still have that blanket to testify to a little piece of the past that would be lost if I didn’t remember.
When I was having babies, my Mom, for some reason, had it in her mind that it was her job to give them, each, their first bath. I hadn’t thought of that or considered it until recently, and last week I knew that I wanted to give Caleb and Hannah a baby bath tub for her first shower. It seemed so important to me that I went to 4 different stores looking for one! (remember, I’m an Erma, and shopping is NOT my thing, so this bears remarking).
Once I finally found a baby bathtub and had it in the car, the memories flooded back to me. Mom, here in Bellingham, giving Caleb his first bath in our little apartment at Varsity Village on the southside in Fairhaven. I don’t know what I was doing, either sleeping or bathing myself in the big bathtub, but it was significant to Mom. For Joshua and Abbie it was in Portland, Josh in a little apartment near Multnomah where Rick was finishing bible school, and Abbie’s first bath was in our first house in North Portland, in the springtime. And my Mom was there, doing the bathing each time, performing a ritual which meant something nurturing and loving and profound to her.
This is not something I think I could do. Take someone else’s slippery, wet, soapy, perhaps crying baby, and with the expert hands that cared for 5 babies of her own, know she wouldn’t drop her. No. I couldn’t even bathe my own babies the first time, so this is not a tradition I can carry on. But I can buy a little plastic baby bath tub and hand it over and know, without realizing at first that I have passed on a time honored tradition that involves water and soap and knowing how to hold a baby and knowing where the still-intact-cord is located and introduce a new person to the cleansing ritual that will be part of her life from here on out.
I don’t know what time-honored traditions I will become part of. What things I will do, or words I will say that might have meaning or impact on my children and on their children in the future. I don’t know how to do this thing called parenting very well, let alone this NEW thing called grandparenting.
But I know how to love. Oh my Lord, do I know how to love! And, somehow, in all my Erma Bombeckness, I will love these kids who are having babies, and I will love this baby, and somehow in love, legacy just might grow.
20 Monday Jul 2009
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19 Sunday Apr 2009
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In case you don’t normally wander over to the right of this screen and check out my blogroll, check out Caleb and Hannah’s latest blog post!
15 Wednesday Apr 2009
