Grandy's Birthday

Mom and Little Guy within an hour of birth

June 10th would have been my Mom's 63rd birthday.  The above picture was taken the day Little Guy was born.  (not the best picture of her, and she'd probably kill me if she were here to do so!)  I wish everyday that she were here to watch him grow up.  She would be having so much fun with him!  She was the best Mom ever.  We had so much fun growing up, because she was so creative with the activities she had us do.  You know all that really cool stuff to do with your kids that you see on Pinterest?  Well, that was my Mom in a nutshell!  She had awesome original ideas (she would seriously have been the richest person on Earth if she had patented most of her ideas).  We had the coolest parties as kids.  I still remember one Halloween party; I must have been between 8 and 10 years old.  I was a punk rocker or something because I had this hot pink dress with black polka dots (Hey, it was the 80's!) and my hair had a tinge of pink with glitter AND I was allowed to wear makeup to go with my costume!  She put an old door on cinder blocks with a vinyl table cloth and made a table out of it for crafting and eating- mostly crafting!  I'm assuming we always had a few cinder blocks lying around because Pop had remodeled the house and my parents didn't want to just get rid of them??  :)  She also (I swear she did!) invented Christmas in July.  One year we were up visiting family in New Jersey and all the cousins got together at Aunt Pat's house and we had this blow up Christmas tree and a big pile of presents.  I got a sweat band (again, it was the 80's!) and some hair clips.  (please don't ask how or why I remember this!)  Another thing Mom was big on were Unbirthday parties.  We would, especially if family from up north was visiting, have a birthday party for everyone in attendance (but only if it was NOT someone's birthday- thus Unbirthday).  We would each make our own gift bags by decorating paper sacks from the grocery store with markers and stickers.  All of this of course was an excuse to have cake and ice cream!  So in her memory, we had ice cream sundaes FOR dinner on her birthday:

Happy Birthday Grandy!!

I guess this would be as good a time as any to explain the title of this blog.  My Mom was always ill; she was diagnosed with Lupus when I was almost 9.  With as sick as she was, she ALWAYS put her kids first, like to the point where we (as young kids) didn't know she wasn't feeling her best.  She was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak.  She was also a CCU/ICU nurse and saw people at their worst, most vulnerable states- often not being able to say goodbye to loved ones before they left this existence and went on to the next.  Always with a cynical sense of humor, she would tell me that we should eat dessert first because you could literally drop dead between your meal and dessert.  I have learned, being in healthcare myself, that this cynical sense of humor kind of comes automatically.  It's sometimes the only way to deal with some of the stuff you become witness to!  Do you know that I can't remember ever eating dessert first, unless it was a picnic or something where dessert was laid out with the rest of the food?!  So, on Sunday, we had sundaes!  And then an hour later we were hungry for actual food, so we heated up some chicken, so we actually accomplished having dessert first!