Grandma’s Birthday

My family had a get together this weekend to celebrate my Grandma’s birthday.  She is such a wonderful woman and is and has always been such a positive supportive force in all of our lives.  As always we had a great time.  Chloe loves being at my parents’ house so much.  I love it too, because they almost always give me at least one morning of sleeping in, and usually two!  Tomorrow night I have to attempt bedtime at a reasonable hour again because Chloe was up late again tonight and that’s not a great combo after a long weekend with too much excitement and not enough sleep.  My cousin had a great idea to create a scrapbook for Grandma with letters from her kids and grandkids telling her what she means to us, thanking her for the beautiful person she is, and sharing memories that we all have of her.  We had a great time finishing up the scrapbooking part of it late Saturday night and the great part is that my best friend came over to check on us and offer a little moral support when we still weren’t finished at 2 a.m.!  

I love looking at old family pictures.  We have done a lot of that lately because my dad has a new photo scanner that he is putting to good use.  It is amazing to see and hear the stories of all of the family members and try to keep the family tree straight in my head.  It makes me sad to think about how different this type of experience might be for Chloe some day.  She will have a million family pictures to look through and she will be in 97% of those pics because she is so darn photogenic and incredibly fond of the camera.  What she won’t have is the possibility of looking through old pictures and finding a shot of grandma when she was 3 looking exactly like her.  Grandma looks like her cousin Grace, not Chloe.  Maybe Chloe will not be the worrier that I am, maybe she won’t be as insecure either.  Maybe I’m raising the first child in the history of the world to be completely comfortable in her own skin and self-assured enough to not need to find those type of answers?  Maybe not.  Maybe, despite how amazingly happy-go-lucky she is at age 2, she will be your average teenager and young adult with questions about who she is and how she fits into the world.  Maybe on top of all of that she’ll wonder why she is where she is, who she came from, how she got here, and why it had to happen to her.  Maybe she’ll try to second-guess the decisions that were made for her by a bunch of adults that she didn’t know.  Maybe.  Maybe for her those questions will be impossible to answer.  That’s not fair.  That’s the part that makes me sad for her.

Who ever said life was fair?  That’s a favorite quote from a very wise friend of my mom’s who I really miss.  It’s not fair for any of us, at some point we all have to realize that.  No one’s life is “perfect” but there are people who have figured out the secret of being perfectly happy.  I’m not necessarily one of those people, but I have a tremendous amount of happiness in my life.  I just usually find a way to balance out the happy with a hefty dose of worry.  I wish I could leave out that second part, but no luck yet!  I hope Chloe is better at this than I am.  I’m not sure how to teach her to look at life in a more realistic light than I sometimes do, but I’m really trying.  We’ll see how it goes…

I haven’t really proofed this post, just kind of getting some thoughts out of my head so I can get to sleep.  Here are some of the cute pics we took this weekend at the birthday party!