On Wednesday nights, we have a sitter that comes and stays with Kathleen so I can go to Bible class. By the time we get home a little before 9:00 pm each week, Constance has put Kathleen in pajamas, given her medication (which includes a sleeping pill) and has put her in bed.
Wednesday evening, Christmas Eve, we came in from Bible class. Kathleen was in her pjs, sitting in her recliner beside her bed. Constance told us she had taken her to the bathroom and she was "good to go" (ready for bed). Constance left and we put her to bed. Most nights she doesn't go right to sleep but by the time we go to bed, she's usually alseep. Here's the rest of the story:
About 10:30 pm: Steve and I go to bed.
11:00-12:00pm: Kathleen keeps calling out for someone to come in there. Sommer repeatedly goes in to her bedroom, tells her its bed time and she needs to go to sleep.
12:00 pm (approximately): Kathleen calls for someone one more time. By this time, Sommer is tired of all the trips in there, and she herself is ready for bed. So, she tells Kathleen, she HAS to go to sleep because Santa Claus is coming and he knows if you're awake. Apparently Kathleen dozes off after this.
2:00-4:00 AM Steve wakes up and is kept awake by his mom singing 17 verses of "Santa Claus is coming to town".
It was only sometime the next day that we discovered that Kathleen did NOT get her sleeping pill the night before :)
Story 2 :
About the middle of October, I bought a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble for Katie for her birthday (October 28). I put it (I thought) in a small box in the top of my closet to keep it safe till her birthday. I had also picked up a couple of Christmas gifts at this point which went in the top of my closet so I wouldn't lose them.
Katie's birthday gets here. I go to get the gift card to wrap it and I can't find it. I mean, I really can't find. I look all through the top of my closet. Then in case I didn't really put it in the closet, I look through all my drawers. Then I look in the boxes in top of Sommer's closet. Then I look in my closet AGAIN. And my drawers. And everyplace I can think of. But the gift card has disappeared. So, I just get her something else, and thinking the gift card will turn up, I plan to give it to her for Christmas.
The week before Christmas, I take everything out of the top of my closet where I put the card (I think), but I can't find it any place. I go through all my drawers (again). It's just gone. That's all there is to it. I regret the loss of the $25, but that's what I get for misplacing it.
Christmas Day arrives. We're all sitting in the living room, unwrapping presents. It's Sommer's turn and she's unwrapping a bottle of Happy perfume. Actually, I had bought it early, put in a small box and wrapped it, and by now I had forgotten what it was. So she opens it, all excited because Happy is her favorite perfume. And then she happens to notice MORE in the box where the Happy is. It's a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble. I promptly take it out of her hand and give it to Katie :)
Oh, wow...that first story is unbelievable! Y'all are so wonderful for being such loving and patient caregivers...I know is it a most difficult job that no one can appreciate if they haven't been there...especially for the long haul..I only helped with my Grandmother enough to get a TASTE of what my mother's life was like full-time...I've always had a tender spot in my heart for caregivers ever since...
I had a very similar experience to your second story. I write all gifts down to keep track of my spending. Then, on Christmas day I check over my list to be sure I hadn't forgotten anything that I might have stashed somewhere.. Well, a gift for Greg was missing and a gift for Kenny was missing. Never found them. Today we had our fourth Christmas (Jessica and Nic just now got to come.) When their gifts were all passed out, those two missing gifts showed up. They'd gotten mixed up in Jess and Nic's gifts somehow. So, Greg and Kenny had a treat today by getting an unexpected gift... Happy New Year to you and yours!
I agree with Nanc on Kathleen. What patience you have, but what funny stories you will have. The Houchens certainly have several on Hoyt. Bless his heart, as much as you respected him, you had to laugh at his "2nd" life! I thought you were going to tell about something else as far as losing!! What happened to Alabama! [x]
On Wednesday nights, we have a sitter that comes and stays with Kathleen so I can go to Bible class. By the time we get home a little before 9:00 pm each week, Constance has put Kathleen in pajamas, given her medication (which includes a sleeping pill) and has put her in bed.
Wednesday evening, Christmas Eve, we came in from Bible class. Kathleen was in her pjs, sitting in her recliner beside her bed. Constance told us she had taken her to the bathroom and she was "good to go" (ready for bed). Constance left and we put her to bed. Most nights she doesn't go right to sleep but by the time we go to bed, she's usually alseep. Here's the rest of the story:
About 10:30 pm: Steve and I go to bed.
11:00-12:00pm: Kathleen keeps calling out for someone to come in there. Sommer repeatedly goes in to her bedroom, tells her its bed time and she needs to go to sleep.
12:00 pm (approximately): Kathleen calls for someone one more time. By this time, Sommer is tired of all the trips in there, and she herself is ready for bed. So, she tells Kathleen, she HAS to go to sleep because Santa Claus is coming and he knows if you're awake. Apparently Kathleen dozes off after this.
2:00-4:00 AM Steve wakes up and is kept awake by his mom singing 17 verses of "Santa Claus is coming to town".
It was only sometime the next day that we discovered that Kathleen did NOT get her sleeping pill the night before :)
Story 2 :
About the middle of October, I bought a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble for Katie for her birthday (October 28). I put it (I thought) in a small box in the top of my closet to keep it safe till her birthday. I had also picked up a couple of Christmas gifts at this point which went in the top of my closet so I wouldn't lose them.
Katie's birthday gets here. I go to get the gift card to wrap it and I can't find it. I mean, I really can't find. I look all through the top of my closet. Then in case I didn't really put it in the closet, I look through all my drawers. Then I look in the boxes in top of Sommer's closet. Then I look in my closet AGAIN. And my drawers. And everyplace I can think of. But the gift card has disappeared. So, I just get her something else, and thinking the gift card will turn up, I plan to give it to her for Christmas.
The week before Christmas, I take everything out of the top of my closet where I put the card (I think), but I can't find it any place. I go through all my drawers (again). It's just gone. That's all there is to it. I regret the loss of the $25, but that's what I get for misplacing it.
Christmas Day arrives. We're all sitting in the living room, unwrapping presents. It's Sommer's turn and she's unwrapping a bottle of Happy perfume. Actually, I had bought it early, put in a small box and wrapped it, and by now I had forgotten what it was. So she opens it, all excited because Happy is her favorite perfume. And then she happens to notice MORE in the box where the Happy is. It's a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble. I promptly take it out of her hand and give it to Katie :)
I love to have company, but let's face it, fellow female pleonasters. We all have to admit that there is a certain amount of stress involved. Cleaning, planning meals, shopping for meals, cooking meals, keeping clean towels, trying to keep the house resonably neat, yada yada yada.
My sister in law, Pam, and her husband, Dalen, are due in tonight. They live in the Springfield, Missouri area and will be here till Saturday.
As visitors go, they are very very "easy" company. I guess that's the nice thing about family visitors. You don't feel quite as much pressure as you do with non-family visitors. For those of you that have known me since FC days, you possibly know Steve's sister Pam also. Her husband, Dalen, is WONDERFUL at fixing things. Whenever he comes, he always finds something that needs repair and then takes care of it.
In the last 20 minutes there have been two "I wonder if Dalen can fix this" statements made :) Last Christmas he put new shower heads on our shower.
Oh rats. I was going somewhere with all of that, and for the life of me I can't remember where. :(
Subject change: My husband, the Mighty Hunter, shot a small buck today. The last time he went hunting, the gun went off when he was releasing the safety and he shot a hole in the wall of the blind.
Anyway, if anyone has any very easy deer recipes, please email them to me at sandimak40@aol.com.
It's now Friday night. Alabama is losing big time. Pam and Dalen are leaving tomorrow morning to go home. Actually, this visit, Dalen hasn't fixed anything. Instead, he went out and bought us a 37 inch flat screen tv. Can you believe it????
A friend of ours who is an avid deer hunter was on his way to a funeral Saturday and a deer ran into his pickup truck. There's just something WRONG about that...
Sounds like several of us in the area could keep Dalen busy if he gets bored at your house... ;)
Put it on the grill. Marinade in Italian dressing for a day in the frig. Get a good rub, Fiesta brand is good, but hard to find. Montreal steak rub is good but tends to be coarse so I put it in a pepper grinder all over and grill till tender. This way extra tallow (fat) drips off, and you get a nice smoky flavor. Or slow cooker with french onion soup mix with potatoes and carrots and onions. Slow cook roasts or haunches for 8-10 hours. My hunting friend has a beer deer recipe, I have tasted it, it might be better if you liked beer, I did not like it, my daughters have a philosophy, "if Pa doesn't like it, it is inedible." Way to go Mighty Hunter! Save the antlers!
Tell Pam hi for me, and tell them to come to Stephenville! I have a bunch of "fix it" stuff! Jim is great at math, but.... Hey Steve, I'm impressed! Soak it in milk, helps with the "gamey" taste. Fry it like chicken fried steak, Happy New Year my friend!
Like my friend, Nick, I was raised in a home that did not believe in having a Christmas tree, or any kind of Christmas decorations. After all, someone driving by might see them and think that we believed Jesus was born on Christmas Day and also that we were celebrating it as a religious holiday.
My dad, a gospel preacher, felt very strongly about this. He was/is a very very conservatively minded man. (And mom agreed with him. We did have presents, but we never opened them on Christmas day. We always opened gifts the day we got out of school.
This reasoning was lodged deep in my brain. I didn't think it was WRONG to have a Christmas tree, but certainly believed you had to be very careful about what others thought. My first Christmas tree (4 feet) was when I shared an apartment in Tuscaloosa with my cousin, Beverly while we were attending THE University of Alabama. Of course, we didn't put it near a window. No one driving by could see it.
After Steve and I married, we had a small tree. Again, I insisted it not be near a window. I didn't want anyone driving by to see it. Steve had been raised very differently from me. He was used to going all out for Christmas with lots of decorations and a big tree. They had even decorated a tree outside in their yard! (The heathens!!) But for the first few years of our marriage, Steve very lovingly and patiently minimized the outward signs of observing Christmas.
Time passes. We lived in Gadsden, Alabama, about an hour from my parents. We now have three children, two of them school age. We moved from our small house to a house that was larger. I loved this house! It had a living room that we seldom used, a large den, and then a smaller den that the previous owners had added on. Christmas time comes around in our new house. Steve went out and bought a tree, a rather large one. After trying and trying to find the right place for this larger tree, I reluctantly agreed that the best place was in front of the living room window. BUT, I said, we will keep the drapes closed!
Steve's parents had one of those small silver trees with blue balls that was about 100 years old. They had moved into an apartment and didn't have room for it so they gave it to us. I put it up in the big den (not to be confused with the little den). Well, we still had the old 4 ft tree that we'd had since we first married. I put it up in the little den and let the children decorate this one with strings of popcorn, holly berries, paper chains and other "home made" things.
So, now I had gone from not having any tree at all to having three trees--one of which was in front of the window! (But the drapes were to stay closed!). It gets worse.
Steve convinced me to let him put lights on a tree in the backyard. No one driving by could see it, he told me, because it was directly behind our house. Three trees--one in front of a window---and lights on an outside tree.
While I didn't believe it was wrong, I would still look at my 3 trees sometime and wonder how this had happened. ESPECIALLY the one in front of the window.
Anyway, one day, close to Christmas, my doorbell rang. I wasn't expecting anyone, and I went to open the door. This was the door that was right by the tree that was in front of the window where the drapes were SUPPOSED to be closed. But somehow they weren't. And as I approached the door to open it, I looked out the big window behind the tree (with the drapes open it was very easy to see out) and behold! It was my own dear father with a friend of his dropping in to surprise me. Boy was I surprised!
I opened the door and let them in. We all walked right past the big tree in front of the window with the drapes open, and went into the big den. My dad sat down in the recliner which was right next to the silver tree with the blue balls. This was the only seat in the room that had a perfect view into the little den where the four foot tree (that the kids had decorated) stood.
I remember feeling not just my face, but my whole body flushing. I do not remember a single thing we talked about during that visit, but I DO remember what we did NOT talk about. We did NOT talk about Christmas trees. It was as if those trees, in all of their glowing glory, were invisible. (Wishful thinking on my part).
Now, I realize this post is long, but there is one more part to the story. This was in either 1992 or 93 I believe. But that has nothing to do with "the rest of the story". Within a couple of days of this happening, I had shared the story with Nick and his lovely wife Ruth that had been my roomate at Florida College. They were living in Texas at the time.
Within just a few days we received in the mail the front page of a newspaper that Nick had created. The stories on this front page were all about how commercial Christmas was to the Kleins and how we didn't even pretend that Christmas had a deeper meaning, yada yada yada. It was hilarious!! I saved that mock up newspaper for years and years. I haven't been able to fin d it in recent years. I know I would never throw it away, so I suspect it's buried deep in a box someplace where it will be "safe".
THE END
PS. This year we have lights on the front porch, on trees in the front yeard, a deer all lit up, and numerous other outdoor decorations. There's a lesson to be learned from this, but I'll let you figure it out for yourself :)
LOVED this post. I was so afraid Jim would not let us celebrate since his family believed that way. I made sure he would be okay with celebrating before we married. I LOVE the decorations, the music and most of all the family time. Thank you for sharing, that was a fun walk down your memory lane.
You tell the best stories! My life seems so boring by comparison. :-) Happy holiday-that-the-Bible-nowhere-even-remotely-suggests-is-near-the-birthday-of-Jesus!
I was making my coffee this morning while I was reading Pleo-wish I had it before I read! Ha! It reminds me of the time I got my ears pierced-as soon as that little gun went in, I knew my Dad was going to walk in the mall. I was in Texas, he was still in Denver. The guilt was tremendous. Connie got her's done about the same time-she felt the same way. A couple of years later, he let mom! It shows the respect we have for our father's. Now that mine is gone, I have many great stories of him that I remember a lot. I love you, and Merry Christmas my friend!
I love this -- you are a great story teller and have great stories. I laughed throughout reading it. And with a wedding in 17 days I needed that laugh! Maybe I will read it again!
WOW! I did not realize your first tree was in Tuscaloosa. i have had friends who don't celberate the Holidays, and they want to make me feel qulity for celberating....however it doesen't work.
ha ha! We always had our tree out of range of the window, too, growing up. However, I have been known to have one smack dab in the front window of the house, but not too often, since I would usually have to rearrange the furniture in order to do that, and I'm too lazy for that. The main stipulation about our tree, when I was a kid, was that it must not have a star perched on the top - you know, it would signify the star in the East that led the wise men to where Jesus was...even though we didn't celebrate Christmas as the birth of Christ...anyway, we still don't put a star on the tree. Our topper is a snowman, gingerbread girl and Santa from the Rudolph special. (all crammed together, each one vying to be in the center. Isn't Christmas fun?! (Oh, yes - and we don't usually decorate the outside of our house, either, other than a wreath on the door and my snowman which hangs up through the whole winter, hoping to bring good luck and snow to the area...oops, I suppose that makes me superstitious...)
I too have many of the same memories about Christmas and decorating, etc. that you had growning up. I'm thankful to say that some of those memories have been replaced with new ones. Well said...from the college roommate, aka cousin P.S. Continue your writing. I really do enjoy reading them! Love you old roomie and - MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Ah Sandi, what fun times we have had. I have told this story a few times but I had forgotten the Newpaper headlines. You gave Ruth and I a really wonderful laugh. Hug Steve we miss you two dearly.
I am sooo behind on Pleo...I really enjoyed my visit with you this morning...(oh, you didn't know we had visited???) I got caught up on your blog and your life... I related to the Kmart blog (ARGH!) and totally enjoyed this one about Christmas... I felt the tension all the way down here in Cullman when your Dad walked in for a visit... WHEW! Much love to you guys!
Today I was shopping at K-mart in the pharmacy department. There was an item I needed to get that normally runs about $20. I was THRILLED to see a 50% off sign right below it. Having been tricked and deceived by misplaced sale signs before, I very carefully matched the bar code on the sign with the bar code on the item. Yep. Same one. I then carefully looked AGAIN to make certain I had the right size. Yep. Correct size. So, delighted with finding such a bargain, I picked up TWO of the items, finished my shopping and proceeded to the check out line.
I was amazed to find a line with only one person in it. Am I lucky today or what? By the time it was my turn to check out, there were 7 people in line behind me and every open register had people waiting in line.
The sweet little cashier wearing her Santa hat rang up all my items. My half off item rang up full price. Both of them did. Of course, I pointed that out to the cashier and explained that they were 50% off. So, off she goes to find a sale paper. Now, I had not seen it in a sale paper. Actually, I had not even looked at a K-Mart sale paper, I just happened across the signs above the item. She looked and looked through the paper. Then she picked up the phone and called back to the pharmacy. By now, the natives behind me are starting to get restless. I apologized to the man directly behind me. He was very sweet and started talking about similar things happening to him and how you had to watch your receipts especially at Kmart and Wal-mart because so often things were not in the computer right. While we commisserated (too many s's?) with each other, the cashier was still waiting for someone in pharmacy to pick up the phone.
The people in line behind me were more than a little restless now. Two babies were crying in my line. So finally, the cashier laid the phone down and said it would be quicker if she just ran over to the pharmacy.
Time goes by. I apologized to everyone in line again , but $20 is $20, right?
FINALLY the cashier came back. She had brought the sign back with her. The one that said 50 cents off.
I couldn't help thinking about you while I was in the Gardendale K Mart yesterday. The cashier was giving the lady in front of me the "the buy one get one 50%" doesn't apply to that." The lady had the ad and the picture of the item beside it. The cashier said that it wasn't in the machine as a sale item The lady bought it anyway. That is how K Mart works.
Ok, now it is my turn to check out. I had a buy one get one 50% off Alabama t shirt. It didn't ring up on sale. The cashier told me the same thing. I told him to call someone from that department b/c there were at least SIX signs with the Al and Auburn apparel. As we were waiting the manager came up. She was very rude. When the department head came, she said she had no idea. I told the cashier and manager to wait. The department head and I took a "little trip." She saw the sign and said you are right. (I was beginning to doubt myself) I suggested we take the sign with us to show the manager. We did and the manager said it didn't apply to Al and Auburn apparel. (The sign said ALL team apparel, buy one get one 50% off, excludes Dallas Cowboy shirts) I was laughing the whole time but I wanted them to see that I was not backing down. I actually felt the gray hairs standing straight up as I was leaving. The nerve of those people. LOLOLOL I did apologize to the people in line behind me but they opened up a separate lane when we "took our little trip." Sorry for the saga but you started the K Mart issue. :D
