A Relaxing Week with a Beautiful Lady

I had such a relaxing week this past week. Portia and Paris went on vacation to San Francisco and the Redwood Forrest with their dad.

 It was the perfect time for my mother to come up and stay with me for a week. I love spending time with my mother and we never seem to run out of things to talk about.  We talked about the bible and God's Word, we talked a lot about the details of my brother and fathers passing. We talked about the girls and homeschooling, about all of our family dynamics. We talked about her future plans and her BIG house or at least her house that seems so big as she adjusts to her new life without my dad.

 We went to Wal- Mart and she helped me to figure out finishing the afghan that I have been working on. We went to church and it was fun to hear her perspective on what my pastor was preaching on. We sat and watch tv each night as I worked on my afghan and she rolled scans of yarn into balls. We talked about politics and things that are going on in our government and it was wonderful to just sit and have good conversation with a like minded soul.......you know, they say, "the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree".  We have so much in common, oh we are very different in how our brains process things but we are very much alike in our values and world views.

This is my beautiful mother, Fran. I love her so much! She is truly the matriarch of our family and has been a tremendous stabilizing force in my life. 

We have always called her the energizer bunny, it is so hard for her to just sit, she has to have a plan and loves to have something to do so while she was here I took advantage of her expert organizational skills and we cleaned out all of the school curriculum and art supplies, sorted out some old books that I no longer wanted and reorganized both the school cabinet and the built in bookshelf.  This took us an entire day!

Then we spent half of another day cleaning and organizing the garage pantry/food storage. Dealing with all the empty canning jars can be quite a challenge but we put our heads together and managed to get everything into the cabinets. The girls other grandparents gave us several boxes of their old canning jars that they were no longer going to use so I had to make room for those too. 

 I discovered that with everything that was going on last fall with my brother and my dad that I really did not get as much canning or reordering of bulk supplies done as I had wanted to.  God is so good though, our freezers are full and we have plenty. We still have some squash and pumpkins left from last years garden in cold storage. I cook the pumpkins and feed them to my dogs, they love it!

Then we spent the last of our time together getting her ipad and iphone set up in a way that made sense to her. We even learned how to change your apple id and downloaded a few new apps. We had fun learning together.  I do soooo love my mother!!!