A few weeks ago, I posted about a Baby Pool we created for my co-worker Laura P. She and her husband Tyler were expecting a baby on July 1 and we had a lot of fun in the office making predictions about all the baby features, gender and birth details. Well today is June 30, a full day before Baby P was to arrive, but lo and behold the little one decided not to wait and has been here for almost two weeks already!
No one guessed that Baby P would arrive that early but she absolutely did. The two things we could not predict were how absolutely beautiful and perfect she would be. Yep, she was a baby girl – Maria Nichole P, weighing in at 6-10 and 18.5″ born at 7:27 pm on 6/17.
When we learned that Laura would be induced early, I bolted out and bought the gift cards for prizes and anxiously awaited the results. And here they are:
1st Place went to Laura P – her woman’s intuition fairly and squarely won her the top prize! She guessed girl, brown hair, and was close to the weight and length. She guessed the time of birth exactly 2 hours off – 9:27 pm.
2nd Place went to Christy R and 3rd place errantly went to Elena T. The next day, Colleen G pointed out a calculation error we made and so she technically should have won third, oops, so I told her to go claim the prize from Elena T, but Elena T had a already run to Target and spent it.
But as I accurately predicted, whatever Baby P was he or she was going to be a blessing and that was dead on. I got to hold her when she was less than 24 hours old and my heart was filled for love!
What do you think? They don’t get any cuter than this do they?
Maria Nichole P is happy to be here waaay before her 7/1 due date
I meant to mention that I attended Laura P’s baby shower on Memorial weekend. I wasn’t sure what to get her so I selected one of these:
A few of you read my post called Vacation List. If you didn’t, it was a post about preserving my memories of a trip to Ecuador in 2018 via a list of words instead of photos. I talked about one word on the list – Goat – and mentioned that if anyone was curious about other words on the list to comment and I would respond.
My friend Betty was curious about the word Housing on the list, so I thought I would post a pic and talk about it briefly in a blog because it is a little too much to put in a comment.
My nephew Joe and his wife Anna Clare lived in Ecuador for a few years teaching English as a second language. When Hubby Tim and I visited them, they were living in Riobamba, a city in central Ecuador in the upper elevation of the country. I didn’t know what to expect about their housing situation, but when we visited we had to stay in a hotel because they lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that had only a kitchenette, bedroom and bathroom – no living room. There were multiple apartments in their complex and it was fairly new construction, so for the area was quite modern.
The homes we saw, including their apartment building, had a courtyard entrance that required a key and the courtyard housed a dog. If you saw the movie Roma (I highly recommend btw), you saw this set up with housing. The opening credits feature a house with an enclosed courtyard that the maid was scrubbing because their dog pooped there.
This picture is of Joe and me on the roof of their building. There was one washer for the whole building and no dryer. Obviously, the clothes are dried on the clothesline. They had one day a week they could use the washer and clothesline and that was Saturday. If it rained, oh well, your clothes got a bonus washing on the line. Riding from Quito (where we flew in) to Riobamba we saw many, many houses and apartments with this set up – clothesline on the roof.
Is anyone else at least a little intrigued by the royal babies that are being born? I love looking at their pictures, probably not because they are royals but just because I think babies are the greatest. My mom always said “there is nothing like a baby” and she loved them too. She was so gentle and loving with little ones and I loved watching her hold mine.
In the royal family, the little boys outnumber the little girls. In my family, on all sides, we have had mostly little girls in the past few years. Or should I say princesses? In the past ten years there have been seven Mothershead girls and one token boy, the Dodsons have two little girls and another little girl on the way and on the LeGrand side, we have had two little girls. Love, love, love them all.
Since my son Andrew had my granddaughter Baby Scarlett, I have always thought she favored Princess Charlotte. What do you think? Royal or regular, aren’t they precious?
Our Princess Scarlett will celebrate her third birthday soon and I thought it would be sweet to share three favorite memories of her. When she was a little more than one, her mom and dad went to the lake with friends and I stayed about a day and a half at their house in Bertrand so all her gear would be close at hand, she could sleep in her own crib and I could dog-sit her big brother Tuck. I had let Tuck out for a potty break and normally he came right back when I called him. But on this day, he enjoyed his freedom just a little too much and I had to call and call for him out the back door. I finally gave up and closed the door. Scarlett listened to all that and continued playing with her toys on the living room floor. About 10 minutes Scarlett said uh uh. “Wonder what she needs?” I thought. She definitely was trying to tell me something. She continued saying uh uh and pointed at the back door. I opened the door and sure enough Tuck had reappeared. I hadn’t heard or seen him but she had and let me know. Brilliant, right?
Second thing that brings a smile is for the longest time, she would not call me Grandma. No, I don’t mean she called me Me-Maw or Gam-Gam. She called me nothing. She had names for most all the significant people in her life but my only name for a long time was Where PaPa? Anytime I picked her up by myself, that was my greeting. Dang it. Now that she is older and speech is well mastered I relish being called Grandma.
For those of you who have Netflix and toddlers, you know Little Baby Bum can be a lifesaver. It is a British animated tv show that features nursery rhymes and children’s songs. Her favorite song on there is Wheels on the Bus. One late night when she stayed with PaPa and me, we were having some challenges getting her to wind down and go to sleep. We put Little Baby Bum on thinking the nursery songs would lull her to sleep. Oh no. She not only wanted to sing along, she wanted to dance along. And not solo. It was 11 pm and PaPa and Grandma were curled up on the couch. She said “Get Up PaPa! Get Up Grandma!” She was ready to have a dance party. She finally got the partying out of her system and fell asleep but it was pretty darn late.
For many years, we have had some ugly virtual holes in our hearts that were left when we lost Bob and then Daniel. Andrew told me that when Scarlett was born, he felt like he had been given something back. Scarlett has certainly done a lot to fill voids in our hearts. Guess that is the magic of a Princess.
You may have read a blog I posted 5/20/19 about a quick trip we took to Ecuador last year. It was a great trip and Hubby Tim and I really enjoyed it. But I swore I was not going to make people look at a bunch of pictures. Not so much now, but before everybody carried a cell phone, well-meaning people would make albums full of their vacation pictures or they would make scrapbooks of ticket stubs and such. Don’t get me wrong, I think these are great things to do to preserve your own memories. But making others look at them can be torture. When I worked at the University, one professor made us look at a slideshow of pictures from when he visited Central America. We groaned, but we sat through it.
So when we went to Ecuador, I only took a few pics and most of my personal memories I listed. Yes, just listed a bunch of words. My hubby says I make too many lists, but y’all, that is how I roll. You can see my list at the end of the post. I am going to choose one word from it to tell you about. If any other words on the list interest you, please feel free to comment and I may tell you if there is a little story or factoid I can share about it or maybe even a picture! See, that is how I can make you look at my vacation pictures.
So I randomly chose the word goat from my list. Here is the story about goat. We were in Riobamba, Joe and Anna Clare’s city in central Ecuador in the higher elevation of the country. They graciously showed us around this lovely city and we dined out a lot. They knew which restaurants were “safe” and would not make us sick, which was comforting. They chose a really cute little place for lunch one day. Joe was pretty excited because one of the specials du jour was goat. He had tried it before and said it was really delicious. I have enough of Ruth Dodson (my mom) in me to not find that appealing, but he, Anna Clare and Hubby Tim all ordered a big plate of it. I did try a bite and it was actually pretty good. This is what it looked like.
Ecuador really is a lovely country. You might want to run down there real quick sometime.
My nephew Joe and his wife Anna Clare were living in Ecuador this time last year. They loved the country and were teaching English as a second language. They were anxious to show off their adopted country, so they invited several relatives to make the trip down, offering to show us around and help us navigate the culture and language.
Hubby Tim and I thought long and hard. We weren’t international travelers and didn’t even have a passport but Joe was quite convincing. So we said yes! We’ll come and visit. We began the passport process because it does take a few weeks/months to get your photo, fill out a somewhat lengthy application, submit, be approved and so on. A few weeks later Joe called and sort of said, hey, before you all buy tickets or anything, we wanted to let you know we may not be here long. It’s not bad or anything, we may just be leaving.
Oh, ok. Well, I guess we were not going to Ecuador after all. Not long after, we learned the reason. Joe and Anna Clare were pregnant! They were trying to figure out whether to stay in Ecuador to have the baby or come home, so that was why they put the brakes on our visit. After they decided to stay and have a dual citizenship baby, they re-invited us and we ran down there real quick after the baby was born.
So the point of this story is that we should not have been reluctant to travel down there. It was a short, but amazingly enjoyable visit.
Driving from Quito to Riobamba
Loved the country, loved the people, loved the new baby. The second point of the story is to show off their beautiful daughter, Daniela that they affectionately called Danielita.
They named her after my son Daniel who passed away 18 years before her birth. They chose Grace as her middle name after one of my dad’s sisters who died as an infant. So this special little girl was absolutely worth a trip real quick to Ecuador!
Have you ever found objects in your home and you had no idea from where they came? That seems to happen to me occasionally. This weekend there was a pair of socks in the laundry and I have not a clue where they came from. They are short men’s socks. I folded them up and put them in Hubby Tim’s drawer. I bet he’ll wear them and probably say, “Where did that one pair of socks come from?” and I’ll say, “I don’t know, but just be thankful you got a new pair of socks.”
This seemed to happen more when my boys were kids. They would have friends over and we’d acquire various t-shirts, shorts, toys and all kinds of things. My theory was that if they missed them or wanted their stuff, they’d come get it. I guess the honorable thing to have done would have been to contact moms and be absolutely sure that those things got back to the rightful owner, but I guess I just wasn’t that motivated to be honorable. I figured, they probably had a fair amount of my kids’ stuff too. It all sort of balances out.
So that said, you realize that even something clearly marked by a constientious mom with their child’s name still might not get back in the right hands. So today, May 20, 2019, I am coming clean. I’m confident that my neighbor Libby Koch made sure that Ryan’s school supplies, t-shirts and underwear were carefully marked so that he wouldn’t lose them. But did I help her out? No. She probably had to go out and buy another pair of scissors for Ryan.
Sorry Libby! Even after Ryan became such a good friend to my Andrew after he lost his brother. How they become fishing buddies and were inseparable in the summer months, tracking from pond to pond hauling back fish and mud and smelling of sweat. Seeing them laugh and be carefree and best buds. After all that, I should have returned those darn scissors. I could have slid them in with Ryan’s wedding gift last year, but I didn’t even do that. Libby Koch, if you read this and want them, just let me know and I’ll drive them over. After 20 years they still work fine.
Laura P in our office is expecting a baby July 1. I decided a great gift would be to give her a Baby Pool.
Nope, not this kind of Baby Pool
Nope, not that kind. In this age when parents know a lot about their babies before birth, Laura’s not knowing anything has been a fun opportunity for us to guess. Yea, that kind of Baby Pool.
Ashley G helped design some cute forms that feature a Baby Pea on which we predicted 8 categories: Weight, Length, Date, Time, Gender, Hair Color, First Initial and Middle Initial. We also wrote notes of encouragement to Laura and Baby P as part of the fun.
Baby Pea
Some observations about the office Baby Pool:
·
Jimmy W predicted not just a boy, but a cowboy who would be born at high noon and weigh in at more than 10 pounds.
· Chris E predicted that the baby would be born at the end of July, but he quickly withdrew that prediction after multiple threats to his life. Likely from the mom to be.
·
Bald was a hair option and and Tyler P, the father of Baby P, was the only one who selected it. Hmm, does that mean mom has had no heartburn?
· We didn’t predict the color of the nursery but a couple of us suggested the right color would be green for Baby Pea or yellow for Baby Pee 🙂
·
Ashley G and I incidentally chose the same date and weight, 7/5 and 7#, 5oz.
·
Boy is trending at 60%, but both the parents predict girl. I bet they sneaked in a Drano test!
· We all agree that Baby P is a blessing and we cannot wait to see and hold her or him!!
Stay tuned and the results will be posted in a few weeks, along with a pic of Baby P. We’ll give prizes to first, second and third place.
Bill Dodson was my dad. He died in 2008 at the age of 94. He was born in the Vanduser, Missouri area and his dad was a sharecropper and his mom was a homemaker. They had a whole bunch of kids, several who didn’t survive childhood. He lived most of his adult life in Blodgett. That is, except for his time in the military in WWII.
Bill Dodson, US Army Corporal – Combat Engineer – wasn’t he a handsome dude??
Since Father’s Day is coming up soon, I thought I would share a few memories about this wonderful man.
Was he an educated man? Well, not exactly. He made it to 6th grade and then I guess he was needed to help with the farm work. But he would spend hours reading and looking at pictures in our World Book Encyclopedias that he worked hard to buy for us. Not educated, but very wise.
Was he athletic? Well, he did work hard but I don’t know that he ever played any type of sport. I think he was pretty svelte (how do you like that word?) in his day. Pretty much everyone was trim back then because they all worked hard and didn’t have a lot of food. He didn’t really like to watch sports either, but my favorite sports-related term of his was for a baseball grounder. He called them “hot ground skinners.”
Was he an animal lover? He loved his dog Bull, half Boston terrier and half Ranger Riley (mutt). He and Bull would ride around Blodgett in Daddy’s blue Chevy truck. Bull would station in the truck bed, his Ranger ears flapping in the wind. As much as he loved Bull, he hated cats and called them things I cannot type. He also didn’t like dogs that weren’t Bull. I can hear him saying “Git outta here you (expletive deleted)!” to any strange dog that wandered into our yard. And many did.
Was he a good cook? When I picture Daddy, one memory is of him in the backyard sweating over a BBQ grill, cigarette hanging from his lips, no shirt, hovering over some chicken cooking, swaying while listening to big band music on his radio. He did most of the cooking in our household too. He did all the frying anyway and my mom opened cans of stuff and used the microwave and that was the extent of her cooking.
Was he playful? Another memory of him was playing with the tape recorder I got for Christmas one year. He played with it more than I did. He liked to pretend he was a radio announcer broadcasting the weather. I remember one report where he said, “It snowed out there probably a foot and the rabbits is all froze up.”
Was he loving? Not in the kissy, huggy way. He was loving in the backbreaking work he did to earn a living as an electrical lineman, for the garden he raised to help feed us, for the Christmas Eves he stayed up half the night to put together doll beds or bicycles. He was loving in the names he called us – Crick, Vick and Son. There could be no better dad.
So in honor of my dad and all the dads out there, Happy Father’s Day.
Hello All – It is Christy Dodson Mothershead LeGrand once again. This is my second blog post. I will have a flurry of posts in the next few days as I try to achieve eight total for a Toastmaster project.
Anyone who knows me knows that I couldn’t blog for long without a post about DBM – Daniel Brian Mothershead, my son who died in 2000 as the result of an ATV rollover. Daniel was just 19 years old when he passed away and that was 19 years ago.
I miss him daily and I am sad that he didn’t get to do some of the things he really wanted to do. They were all (mostly) really good things, the most important of which was to be the best dad ever. He was on track for that though because he had a girlfriend who he thought might be “the one.” And I believe that after he finished college and landed a decent job, they would have married and had some little towheads and he would have LOVED being their dad.
But this post is not about Daniel’s future. I called it DBM at KHS. I want to talk about his time at Thomas W. Kelly High School. This is on my mind because tomorrow, May 19, 2019 is graduation at Kelly High and I will be presenting a scholarship to a graduate in his memory. This year is the 20th anniversary of the Class of ’99 of which Daniel was the valedictorian.
Daniel loved to write. His dad nor I took Yearbook Class, but Daniel did. He was contemplating a career that included journalism and that class was a good fit. Plus he adored Mrs. Smith, the teacher. She was top notch and so encouraging and motivating. I mention Yearbook because the year after Daniel passed away, Mrs. Smith dedicated the next Yearbook, The Talon, to Daniel and I so appreciated that. He would have loved that. When Mrs. Smith told me about what she was going to do, she said that one thing you could always count on with Daniel was that he would write a LOT. His Yearbook captions were always the longest. It was as if he had a lot to say, and a short window of time to say it.
Another love Daniel had at KHS was FFA – Future Farmers of America. His grandfather and grandmother had a farm north of Benton and he spent a lot of time there. He enjoyed the livestock and crops. He joined FFA right off the bat at Kelly and loved the opportunities to build leadership and public speaking skills even more than the just the agricultural aspect. He advanced through the local ranks quickly and ended up as the Regional FFA President. He was over the top proud of that and went on to be a State FFA VP in college. But as a mom, my favorite thing about FFA was seeing him grow. He led the local FFA banquet like a pro his senior year. And FFA was how he met his girlfriend – Katie from Nebraska. She too was a state FFA officer. It seemed appropriate that we buried him with his blue FFA jacket and we put the FFA emblem on his headstone.
It is May and that used to be the season for proms in high school. I know it was in the late 90s. I think many schools have moved theirs to April. Maybe they thought girls would wear a coat over their strapless dresses. Anyway, Prom is a special KHS memory I have of Daniel. His junior year, I think he had to ask three different girls before he got a date. Of course, I thought he was handsome and a good catch, but I was his mom. He was a little awkward at age 17 and hadn’t grown into his feet yet and yea, I know he chewed with his mouth open. But he did go with a sweet girl that year and had a wonderful time. By the time of his Senior prom, I’m not sure what happened, but he had lots and lots of prom dates! I hope I don’t miss any of these but I remember Sarah from Oran, another from Notre Dame (can’t recall her name darn it!), Ashley from Advance and Amber from Kelly. All lovely girls. He was able to rent a tux once and keep it for about a month and use it for every prom. He even wore it in the evening wear portion of the Mr. KHS contest that year and won!!
Final KHS memory, I promise. My favorite was graduation in May, 1999. As I may have mentioned (wink), Daniel was valedictorian of the class and that accomplishment earned him the privilege of delivering a speech. By that time, his dad had been ill with brain cancer for about 18 months and was not in very good shape. As many of you know, his dad would pass away about 7 months later. I couldn’t have been more proud of that speech – it was funny, it was sad, it honored his classmates, it showcased his confident speaking skills and it drew a standing ovation. It also honored his dad. Little did we know that it would be one of Daniel’s last messages to friends and family. We have the speech on VHS tape and now on DVD and we watch it every now and then and sigh and smile and remember DBM at KHS. Love you Daniel.
Hi – This is my very first post, so bear with me. I really don’t know what I am doing yet, but I thought I would just dive in and learn on the go.
I am Christy LeGrand, formerly Christy Dodson, then Christy Mothershead. My blog will feature some historic content because my brother, sister and I are going to put together a book about Blodgett, Missouri in honor of the sesquicentennial of our beloved hometown that will be celebrated in 2020. We hope to find some old photos and materials that we can include in the book. If you have some or know anyone who might be a resource, please let one of us know.
In cleaning out closets looking for items that may be relevant to the book, I ran across this photo. Look at it carefully and if you are able to, zoom in. This is an original photo. I promise there is no photoshopping.
I hope readers can help decipher a few mysteries in the photo. There are many knowns though that make it interesting. Let’s go over those.
It was probably taken about 1920. The photo is of my grandmother, Mary Ethel Ownesby Gage. She is with her first husband, John Jefferson Gage who is 50 years her senior, but obviously still able to father children. He was not my grandfather. The little people are Willine Gage, the eldest, who is sporting a huge hairbow. The baby girl on the hip is Helen Geraldine. I never met my Aunt Willine, but I did meet my Aunt Gerry and she was a very beautiful and bright lady.
Let’s talk about the house. Isn’t it really pretty? This was before the Depression and the family seems to be well enough off to have a nice home. This house was where the Royce Gates family lived when I was growing up in Blodgett. It isn’t there now.
So what is mysterious? A couple of things intrigued me. One thing of note – there are wires going in to the dormer windows on the right. What could those have been in 1920? No cable, no electricity, no phones? What the heck? I appreciate any ideas on that.
Second thing – if you zoom in on the window by the baby, on Mary Ethel’s left, you can see the creepy face of someone peering out. Wonder what that was all about? Who could that have been?
I appreciate any observations that you can add to this photo. I am not sure if it will make the book, but I loved that it captured a moment and featured a really nice home in Blodgett 100 years ago.
Christy’s Corner 