Musings: Ingredients for an Exhilarating Weekend

Being with family is both exhilarating and exhausting! My brother and his wife visited us for five days that were warm, loving, peaceful, and enjoyable. In the middle three days we mixed in their daughter, another brother and his daughter, all our children and grandchildren, and my husband’s sister and husband.

Knox, age 4½, and Findlay, age 13 months, stirred constantly. Kinley celebrated her tenth birthday on Saturday, midst much Hawaiian hoopla.

On Saturday, along with various colleagues, connected friends, and former students, we all celebrated with Steve his retirement with a dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, China Gourmet.

On Mother’s Day we folded in our son-in-law’s mother and husband and brother and fiancée. All the mothers had children there, and the husbands and children prepared our Mother’s Day feast. Delightful!

My brothers and I intensely missed the fourth generation that used to be at our Mother’s Day celebrations—our third year without our mother, and much longer without Steve’s and my sister-in-law’s mothers.

There’s something about family celebrations that needs four generations. We need the Aunt Mae to wait on or the Grandma to pamper. We need the pictures with the youngest in the lap of the oldest.

So now we’re the oldest, but we’re not yet ready for only lap pictures. We can all still assemble on the lawn for one of those stilted, “everyone look at the camera when it starts blinking” pictures made with the camera timer. We can still play with the children in the yard or on the floor; we can still stay up well past midnight playing Scrabble or Boggle or Quirkle. (Guess our family has a thing for games ending in le.)

So we must relish these times, remembering Mother playing in the yard with her children and then her grandchildren, adding our own memories with our children and grandchildren. This is truly a terrific time of life for us—schedule flexibility and enough body flexibility to enjoy a multitude of activities and events.