Jill Turns Thirty!

Jill's 30th birthday was last week on July 14. I should have a more portrait-type picture of her, but nevertheless here she is and here is my story!

My pregnancy with Jill was rather nerve-wracking. The previous August I had had a 2-1/2 month miscarriage. The doctor told us there was no reason that we could not have more children, and to wait a month or two and try again.

During my pregancy with her, we had two concerns: 1. that I would miscarry again and 2. that we would not make it to the hospital once I went into labor. My labor with Todd, who was four years old, had been less that two hours of contractions, and he was breech! We made it through the months all right, and as I approached my due date (I think it was July 24th) we began to carry a suitcase with us wherever we went, and also some emergency supplies!

It was a hot summer. We had gotten Todd a wading pool for his fourth birthday in June, and I stuck my feet in it often to cool off. I remember eating LOTS of watermelon, too!

A night or two before her birth, we were shopping at the mall, and I found some white eyelet fabric, and I showed it to Ken. "If we have a girl, I want a yard of this fabric!"

I went into labor on Friday evening, the 13th, and we went to the hospital, probably before midnight, but it didn't happen fast like we thought it would! I think it was about 4:46 AM that she was born, weighing 6 lbs. 15 oz. This was my first delivery to be awake, although Ken was outside the delivery room and not with me. They told me I had a girl, and plopped her on my tummy to admire, and I can remember saying, over and over, "We have a girl!" When I reached out to touch her forehead, it was a wonderful, velvety feeling to me. Thiry years later, I can remember it, even if I cannot describe it very well! I was still on the delivery table and thinking about little white tights and black patent leather shoes!

When I said, "Tell my husband!" they said you can tell him yourself, and wheeled me out of the delivery room, and there he stood. "We had a girl!" I shouted, or it seemed to me that I shouted, and then realized I was in a hospital where others were probably trying to get some sleep!

I enjoyed having a private room afterwards, because there were not semi-privates available. I was not back in my room very long until Ken and I began making plans to go to Quakertown for convention. He had a scheduled plant shut-down at that time, and we had hoped that if our baby was born early like others had been born, we could probably go. My mom and Aunt Bertha came to see us that day. Ken went down to Murphy's Mart and brought me back a yard of that white eyelet material!

So, we began life with a little baby girl. Roy was six and Todd was four. Jill was 3 1/2 weeks old when we went to Quakertown. We had hot sunshine the first day of convention and rain for the next three, but Jill fared just fine. Two weeks later we went to Newry, and I remember Leah Bolt telling me, "Alma, I can tell that your baby has grown since Quakertown!" We were so very proud of her.

Some months later I got the little white eyelet dress made for her, too!

And now, thirty years have past, and Jill has three children of her own!

I am back!

Wow, I haven't blogged for a while! Last week I put the garden pictures on facebook. It takes sooooooo looooooong to put the pictures here. I wish I knew how to do them easier and more efficiently.

So, it is time for an update on life around Beechwoods! The garden is growing wonderfully well, and we have had the first few zucchini. Soon they will be a bumper crop! I nearly have the whole garden covered with grass clippings now, and those rows that looked so far apart seem to be getting closer! I am glad I have room so that I do not have to crowd my stuff.

We had Heidi, Kirsten, and Shane for the week preceeding the 4th of July. We had lots of fun, and did some cooking and baking together, and toward the end of the week, we made the girls jumpers and t-shirt tops. They each helped on theirs and we had a great time in the sewing room! They were justifiable proud of the finished project!

Another memorable thing we did on Sunday, July 5, was to ride bikes on Rails-to-Trails in Brockway. We went with Teresa and her girls and my brother Glenn. Some went two miles in and two miles back, including four-year old Shane on his little bike--wow, could that kid pedal! Heidi, Hannah, Leigh, Teresa, Lily, Glenn and I kept going to the swinging bridge. When we got back out, my bike speedometer was at over 12 miles! Fortunately it is pretty much flat--otherwise this ole granny would never be able to pedal that far!

Todd and I convinced Ken to get a bicycle. He was concerned about biking because on his old bike, his hands went to sleep. He got on comfort bike, a Giant Sedona, the same model as mine. Last weekend we took two rides together and it was great! Biking is such great exercise, and it makes me smile!

Life has proceeded through July. I have been focusing on trying to get some sewing done this week and it has been fun. My new sewing room works very well. With three windows in the room, the natural light is wonderful, and I can thread my sewing machines without my glasses most of the time! I have four new skirts and two new tops so far.

We are enjoying our new downstairs bedroom. For a while it felt like a motel room! It has so much space and is close to our two bathrooms--no more nocturnal trips down the steps for me in the middle of the night anymore! We are pleased with our furniture, and haven't really filled up all the drawers yet! We have a table, about 30 inches square which I have set in front of the windows and it makes a great place for the laptop. Last week we moved a wooden rocker from the living room back to a spot beside the table. It seems like we end up spending time in this bedroom. I used to say we didn't "live" in our bedrooms--they were upstairs and on the small side, so we never spent extra time there, but this one is different. We used to always close the door on this room on Sunday morning, but now I am pleased to keep the room tidy enough that I am not ashamed to keep the door open!

We are looking forward to our conventions next month. Three weeks from now we hope to be at Freedom and another two weeks after that will be Newry. Tomorrow we go to workday at Newry.

Thursday's garden pictures

Well, it has been a busy time lately. I took some garden pictures last Friday but did not publish or blog about them. Once again the weather was dismal and cloudy. My sister Lois had arrived on Thursday and Friday at four thiry in the afternoon, Sheila became Mrs. Andrew Wyatt! This photo of the two of them is my favorite of all the wedding pictures I took.

The canopy was situated on a courtyard next to the Allegheny River in the picturesque town of Foxburg, PA. The sun came out in the middle of the afternoon and it was perfect for the outdoor wedding.

Lois left on Tuesday this week. Tomorrow Peggy and Marie are coming for the weekend and on Sunday we are meeting Leigh and Jill to bring Heidi, Kirsten, and Shane here for a week. Methinks I had better keep my running shoes on!

And now for my garden pictures. It was so sunshiney this morning I decided to take my pictures a day early.

My impatience do well by the door going into the back of the garage. It gets shade there most of the day. Looks like I should get a new pot for next year, though!

This is a hollyhock that I planted last year. It has flower buds on it and I can hardly wait til they come out! Hollyhocks are an old-fashioned flower. I think they are biannuals.

My row of sunflowers in the right picture are looking toward the sun as usual!

The second row of potatoes that I planted in the garden near the house were big enough to hill this week.

A close-up of one of my tomato plants, thoroughly mulched with grass clippings.

Below is a picture of my tomato patch. It is time to get the stakes in and start tying them up.

The first row of potatoes that I planted is still growing vigorously and I have hilled them several times. There are blossoms coming on them as well as on my tomato plants.

Ah, zucchini squash. I planted some seed inside in little pellets to get a head start on the season, and this is one of them. We love it stir-fried with peppers and onions and cheese. And zucchini bread, and z-bars. We can hardly wait!

So far, I am almost keeping up with the garden. It usually gets ahead of me come August, but I really do love June in the garden!

Oops, I just realized that a couple of pictures that I was downloading are missing. I do them three at a time, and it is rather tedious. One was of my potato patch in my outer garden, which is doing well. The other was a close-up of a potato plant that showed the blossoms. If there was a third one, I cannot remember it! I sure wish it was as easy to do pictures here as it is on facebook...

Next week my garden pictures will have grandchildren in them hopefully!

Todd Turns 34!

Yik

es! Our kids are getting to the age where I have to stop and figure out how old they really are! All our children were born in odd-number years, so once they all have their birthdays, they are either all odd or all even numbers. This is an even year.

Here sits Todd with the birthday cake his wife, Sue, (in the background) made with the help of their six-year old Laura. They also have another daughter, Abby, who is 2 1/2, and are expecting a boy on August 3.

But long before Todd was a husband and father he was our second baby. We had wanted our first two children two years apart, and our first son, Roy, was 2 years and 2 1/2 months old when Todd was born June 13, 1975. I have a picture in my mind of Roy sitting outside the back door on the old well, and thinking how lonely he looked, sitting there all by himself. It made me glad we were having another baby! And, of course, in those days, we did not know if it was a boy or a girl.

Like my other pregnancies, I did not have morning sickness. But my pregnancy with Todd was a little different in that I seemed to have so many of the Braxton-Hicks contractions. They seemed to exhaust me in the last months. I also gained all my weight in the first 6 months, and none in the last two--Todd was born about a month early. He was due on July 9, but was born June 13. There were no routine sonograms done then, either, to determine if we had goofed a month on the due date. I don't think we did. We had taken some Lamaze childbirth classes, too, in preparation for our second childbirth experience.

Thursday night, June 12, I had worked out in the garden, crawling around on my hands and knees, pulling weeds or whatever. About 10:40 that night, I got up from a chair in the kitchen and whoosh! My water had broken with a big splash! I called the doctor and talked to his nurse, and she said I would probably go into labor within 48 hours. I told her I had been planning to wash my hair and get a bath, and she said, "Honey, get a shower, but I wouldn't wash my hair!" So, that's what I did. About 11:30, when I was getting ready for bed, I noticed a slight contraction, and then I had some bloody show, too. This time when we called the dr. the nurse told us to go to the hospital. We called Martha to come stay with Roy, who was in bed sleeping and didn't know anything about what was going on!

I remember telling Ken, "Our baby will be born on Friday the 13th! I am going back to bed!!" As if that would have made any difference....

Off we went to the hospital. The contractions were getting stronger. Walking into the hospital, I had to stop during a contraction because I felt such pressure in my bowels! Ken said, "It must be close, because we learned at those classes that that is something that happens near delivery! How right he was! When the nurse examined me in the labor room, they called the doctor to come from Brockway for the delivery (about 10 miles). We probably got to the hospital between 12:30 and 1:00 AM. When Dr. Devlin arrived, I was in the delivery room, and he explained to me that my baby was in the breech position and he would have to put me to sleep to deliver the baby. He knew that I had taken classes and wanted to be awake for the delivery. At that point, all I could say was "How soon?" I welcomed going off into oblivion for a while!

Todd Franklyn Grady was born at 1:34 AM on Friday, June 13. I had had less than 2 hours of labor contractions. He weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces and was the biggest of all four of our babies. He is still the biggest! Ken had chosen Roy's first name, so I chose Todd's first name. I had always liked the name, and I think it had some connection with Abraham Lincoln's sons?? Not sure about that one. His middle name came from Frank Porter, a worker who had been in our part when I was in grade school. I was very fond of him, and the y in the spelling is also the way his name was spelled.

So we had a second boy. His first day of life was rather miserable for him, because he did not like to be moved and would cry in a high-pitched screech when I unbundled him to count his toes, etc.! He was battered up from the delivery. When the doctor visited later in the morning, he said that if Todd had been head first, he didn't think he would have made it to the hospital for the delivery, and maybe I would not have either!

We began life with our two little boys. Todd grew and gained weight like crazy on an exclusive breast-milk diet for the first four months. I ate like crazy, but still got down to about 135 or so very easily.

Todd is the tallest of our children. I say he must have grabbed all the tall genes off both sides of the family tree, because neither of our families have any exceptionally tall people in them. Todd's namesake, Frank Porter, is 6'4", so maybe he was taking after him!! When Todd was still 12, he grew into size 12 shoes.

Yes, indeed, all our children are very special and unique, and I love to write about them and remember all these things!

Friday's Gardens, Week 3

Friday's garden, week three was another dismal day, weather-wise, but I took pictures this morning anyways. The garden has really changed a lot since last Friday. Tuesday night, Ken mowed the grass and gave me lots of grass clippings to use as mulch in the garden! More pictures on that later. Ross took this picture of me, and calls it "Mom watching her garden grow"! In reality, this was Tuesday night, and I was resting and waiting for more grass clippings. But, I really do spend a fair amount of time watching my garden grow! And now, for my Friday morning pictures:

The porch boxes are starting to show lots of color.

Tuesday night's mulching around my tomato plants is already getting brown. If weeds dare make an appearance through two or three inches of grass clippings, they are easy to spot and pull out.

The potatoes are growing vigorously. I really enjoy hilling potatoes. And the neat thing about growing potatoes is that to harvest them, you just dig them and put them in the cellar! No hot afternoons filling hot glass jars are involved! And store potatoes are such a disappointment after growing our own.

Lots of mulch around this tomato plant, too. I have a few volunteer potato plants coming up in my tomato patch. I will let some of them grow and dig them for "new" potatoes.

This is my experiment with the sunflower and moonflower growing together. I think I have about three moonflowers coming up that I am hoping will grown on the sunflowers.

Oops! I loaded that one twice! No wonder it took me all afternoon to load these pictures!

Our rhubarb patch is soon going to seed and weed. I made several pies a few weeks ago, and Ross picked enough yesterday to make a couple of pies to take to Ohio with him. He is going out to spend the weekend with the Wyatt's, and help Andrew enjoy his last days of bachelorhood before next Friday's wedding.

Yes, Ross has some pie-baking experience! It's just another one of the ways he reminds me of my brother Ben.

Not real impressive yet, but it is coming!

This is a zuchini plant surrounded by mulch. Plants seem to take a growth spurt right after you put grass clippings around them.

Ken's mother bought me this sign several years back--"This garden is hopping!" I think she was impressed with the size of the tomato plants the year before.

My "kitchen window" view

The flowers around the back door are starting to look nice, too. Ross pressure washed and stained the deck for us last week.

These petunia and red salvia are thriving in a leaky canner out by the double doors of Ken's shop.

Flashback to Tuesday night: Ken is coming to unload some clippings.

I heaped them up!

A more distant view of the garden Tuesday night...

Lots and lots of grass clippings! I will never forget seeing Bob Harper's garden is Cheswick about 15 or 20 years ago. It was thick with grass clipping, and starting to compost. His tomato plants were beautiful, and so were the tomatoes! It was September, I believe, so there were lots of ripe ones. Forever after, I wanted a garden like his. And while my garden tends to get ahead of me in August and September, I really enjoy June in the garden. I think it must be the nurturing instinct in me. I like to watch those little plants grow!

Ah, well on its way to becoming one of my prized tomato plants!

Perhaps I will take some pictures on a sunshiney day and post them, even if it isn't Friday!

Friday's Gardens, Week 2

Today is another rainy dismal Friday, and not very nice for taking pictures of my garden! I braved the elements to take a few garden pictures, but first I must share some pictures of our new bedroom furniture. We got a bookcase bed, queen-size, and a chest shown here... and a dresser on the other side of the room.

We ordered it from my brother, Lindberg Furniture, about six weeks ago. Since that time, I have been moving things around between four rooms of our house. Three bedroom upstairs are changed around, and this room, my former weaving studio, is now our downstairs bedroom. No more carrying laundry up and down steps! No more trips downstairs in the middle of the night for the bathroom (I have been doing that for about 35 years!)

There is still more work to be done and stuff to go through and sort, but we are making progress. And now for the garden pictures--hopefully next Friday will be a sunny day and everything will look more pleasant!

The tomatoes are growing. Ross and i put in more potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash yesterday in the garden near the house. That completed it.

The potatoes are up enough now to follow the row. These are red potatoes, and leftovers from our wonderful crop last year.

The beans are making an appearance, too, along with a little fine weed that plagues my garden. Frequent rototilling and grass clippings help in the paths between the rows, but the little stuff next to the plants needs hand work.

Ross and I also planted another garden beyond this one from the kitchen window. We planted 4 rows of sweet corn and three rows of Kennebec seed potatoes. The ground out there was part of a strip job, and is rather rocky. Ross has been helpful to me to till it up after Ken plowed and harrowed it. We got it all planted yesterday.

I have one flower bed by the garage to clean up and plant some things in, and that's it for planting for me!

The front porch picture looks a little dismal this week, too, but the flowers are coming along nicely.

Ah, the clematis. The one I posted about last week is pink and on the corner of the garage. This one is on the back corner of the house, and like the pink one, it faces east. My niece Linda made a comment about last week's clematis, and hoped hers would soon look like mine. We have two other clematises, planted in the corner of the garden in front of the porch. You can barely see them in my porch picture. They are several years old, but seem very pathetic compared to the pink and lavender ones. Maybe they are a different kind, but they are hardly worth bothering with. I coax them a little bit each year, but they sure never look like these two!

If you like looking at gardens, son Roy posted some pictures on Facebook yesterday of his garden. This is his very first garden and I am very proud of him for doing it! I think it is about 10' by 12' and takes up a big chunk of their back yard. It sounds like they are really enjoying watching it grow!

May 31, 1971, the Beginning of the Fulfillment of our Dreams!

I had promised to write about our wedding day in honor of our anniversary last Sunday, but of course, we were too busy celebrating that day, and I wanted to spend my time with my dearly beloved instead of on the computer!

We had actually tentatively chosen our wedding date two years prior, before Ken went to Viet Nam. Why did we pick that day? It was Memorial Day Monday. Nowadays, Memorial Day is always on a Monday, but back then it was May 30, unless that fell on a Sunday. Then it was celebrated on Monday. Such would be the case in the year 1971.

I wanted to get married on a holiday Monday because I didn't like the idea of getting married on a Saturday, and then making a choice about whether to go to meeting the next morning. It seemed like most people did not get to meeting the next day because they were off on their honeymoon! Getting married on a Monday like we did solved that problem ever so nicely. And I just found out last year at convention that our friends Jim and Cheryl Hutchison did the same thing for the same reason! They were married the same year as us, and I think a week later on Monday.

In the late winter we began to make our plans. BUT we had one huge hurdle. My mother did not want to sign for us to get married since I was the tender age of 18. There was no way we could have waited another 3 years to get married. We had already waited long enough! I had worked for a year and we had saved money for our future.

Mother held off for a long time, and we figured we might have to go to another state to get married, but finally, finally, one day I "played a card" which was probably pretty cruel to her, and said, "Mom, you know that Daddy always said he would sign for me anytime!!" (He had told me that from the time I was about 12 and he was kidding me about getting me married off. My dad had died a year before that time, and we were still in grief over his sudden death, so that's why I didn't "play that card" until I had to!) Well, it worked, and my mom kinda teared up and said, "Well, okay." But she wasn't very happy about it, not that she did not like and approve of Ken, but I suppose she felt like getting married at 18 would mean I would be saddled with a family at a young age.

Another dream I had was that I did NOT want to be married in some Justice of the Peace's office. My dream was to get married in the house where we were going to live. In March, Ken put an ad in the paper: Wanted: house in the country to buy or an apartment to rent. One person who answered his call was the lady who lived in this house. He quickly found out she was his boss' daughter. She and her husband and 8 year old son had lived in this house for about 2 years. The husband was an insurance agent, though, and found he was making lots of trips back into town for his work (about 7 miles) and he wanted to move back into town. They hadn't put their house on the market yet, but agreed that we could come see it.

In those days you needed 25% down, and we figured we could afford a $3,000 down payment. This house was $16, 000. but with it came a refrigerator and a stove, so we figured we could afford it. We told them anything else they wanted to leave behind, we would gladly accept. We got lots of fiberglass drapes, a couch with matching chairs, end tables (still in use at daughter Jill's house!) and lots of other miscellaneous. All those things, and the generosity of others helped us "set up housekeeping."

We looked at the house in late March, and could arrange to move our things in the first weekend in May. We bought new bedroom furniture and new living room furniture and a set of lifetime stainless steel cookware. The living room furniture has long since worn out, the bedroom furniture is in use at Jill's house, and the cookware is still in use in my kitchen--it really is lifetime stuff, and the only thing we have done is replace some handles on it! Because it cost around $400, I always include it with the major expenditures of our early married life!

Since I had finally talked Mother into signing for us, we could go ahead with our plans to be married in our house. Large weddings and wedding gowns were frowned upon in those days, but nevertheless, I wanted a wedding and I wanted to wear a white dress that I had made myself for the day. I felt like I had earned the right and privilege to wear a white dress! It was white crepe, a shirtwaist style with a belt. It had tucks on the front of it with lace sewn into them. The skirt was pleated. The buttons were kind of irridescent when they caught the light or the sun. It had long sleeves with wide cuffs on it. It still hangs in one of the closets here, but of course I cannot get into it! I probably weighed about 135 on my wedding day.

Ken arranged for a Justice of Peace from Brockway to come to the house to marry us. They agreed on a dollar amount of $20, I think. Afterwards, when Ken went to pay him, he only charged $10! One of our jokes is that when he came to perform the ceremony, and saw the bride Ken was getting, he figured I was only worth $10! In reality, it might have had more to do with the fact that we had just bought homeowner's insurance from him!

We had wanted to have Gary and Donna Burkett, Ken's two cousins, stand for us. Gary was unable to make it, so we had my brother Ben for best man, and Donna for my bridesmaid. She wore a yellow dress with daisies on it. I had bought the same dress in my size and wore it as my "going away" dress.

We were married at 1:00 with close family members in attendance. Our invitations were for the reception which was to start at 2. The weather was a little overcast, but it did not rain. My cousin Gertie prepared the food for the reception. I think we had ham and other things. Our lovely wedding cake was made by a neighbor, Kay Yonker, from home who had made a cake three years prior for Ken at a Memorial Day picnic we had just before he left for the Army. Kay would not take any money for the cake and said it was my wedding gift. Her daughter and I had been playmates.

We planned to go to New England for our honeymoon. Nowadays I tell young people, don't go anyplace exotic or expensive on your honeymoon--you won't remember where you went anyways! Do the expensive stuff when you are in your right mind!

So, about 4 or 5 o'clock, I changed into my yellow daisy dress, (I don't think Ken changed his clothes), and in a flurry or rice throwing we left in Ken's navy blue Mustang! We had to stop about a mile away for Ken to reattach some wires, and empty stones out of the hubcaps, etc. We found a little note on the gas cap that said, "Congratulate this couple, they just got married!" We left it there, but only one gas attendant congratulated us. We had a nice trip to beautiful New England, but really, we were so wrapped up in each other, and so glad to be together all the time, that I do not remember much about what we saw!!!! It was great to get back home on Friday night, buy some groceries, and move on into married life in our big old house in the country!

The final part of my story of our day is to write about the morning of my wedding day. I had wondered where to read in the Bible, and somehow I found the last chapter of Proverbs and read it. It's a wonderful story about the qualities of a virtuous woman, and I knew I wanted to have those qualities both spiritually and naturally. I still read the chapter each year on our anniversary, and other times, too! Different verses have been special to me over the years of our married life. "worketh willingly with her hands", "she maketh herself coverings of tapestry" (when sewing my own clothes), "she maketh fine linen and selleth it" (weaving rugs and selling them, "she is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with scarlet"(making sure all the kids had warm clothes for winter) "she eateth not the bread of idleness (I plead guilty to not living up to that verse!) "in her tongue is the law of kindness(a good way to measure what I say, and still pleading guilty).

The verse that has been most important to me in the recent years of our marriage, now that the children are raised and we are a twosome instead of a sixsome, is verse 12: "She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life." This one comes to me often and has been a good motivator to me to take Ken a bowl of ice cream, a cup of coffee, or just in general do something nice for him. Sometimes we wives get crabby, and think to ourselves, "Why should I do that? What does he ever do for me? And on, and on, and on." We agree to love, honor, and cherish, and that is what I feel is so important at this stage of our marriage. It is unlikely that we have as many years ahead of us as we do behind us in our marriage, and I would like to cherish what we have while we have it! Love, really, is the idea of the thing....