Category Archives: photos

gluten-free treat

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Today’s theme for PhotoHunt Saturday is utensils. I photographed the baking supplies a few weeks ago for my iStock account. I don’t really bake much anymore since I had to go on a gluten-free diet. It’s a lot more complicated, and the truth is, most GF baking recipes just aren’t worth all the trouble. I have made one yummy discovery though, 123 Gluten-Free Pan Bar mix is delish when made with added pumpkin and a cream cheese frosting. I serve it often to “regular” people. Everyone seems to love my pumpkin bars and they didn’t know they were gluten-free until I told them:)

Vegetables are a must on a diet.  I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie. ~Jim Davis

Frank McCourt

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FrankMcCourt

Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt died on Sunday. A former public school teacher, he came late to a writing career publishing one of my favorite memoirs, Angela’s Ashes, at the ripe old age of 66. Born in Brooklyn in 1930, his family returned to his parents’ native Ireland when he was four years old and his memoir chronicles his years growing up in poverty with a mostly absent alcoholic father in the slums of Limerick. He famously wrote: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.

My mother had a similar childhood, but here in the states and with poor French Catholic parents, not Irish. Still, fourteen children, very little money, and an alcoholic father bring about like miseries whatever your demographics. It’s funny, but I catch myself sometimes feeling angry at my mother since she passed. For dying and leaving me. For loving my brother more. For her “You can’t take it with you!” attitude toward money which has cost me financially over the years and left my father vulnerable at the age of 80 with a large monthly mortgage payment. And yes, for not understanding me, that universal childhood lament that few of us escape – miserable childhood or not.

I know it’s childish to think these thoughts at my age, especially given that my childhood was a fantasyland compared to my mom’s and Mr. McCourt’s. But I also know that a part of us is always our mother’s child, no matter how old we grow in years. And whether we write an angst filled memoir and name it for her, or gaze into the eyes of our newborn granddaughter and miss her more than we ever thought possible, we know in our hearts that we’d forgive our mothers a thousand times over for the woes of our early years for just one more chance to tell them how much we love them.

special delivery

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The theme today for PhotoHunt Saturday is “Rocks”. I do have some actual pictures of rocks, but I couldn’t help myself, just one more post about baby Brooklyn. Because as you may have guessed…being a new grandparent rocks! A friend of mine pointed out that in the second shot she’s practicing holding her cell phone! See more PhotoHunt Saturday pics here.

Babies are such a nice way to start people. ~ Don Herold

lefty-loosey

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Okay, so right after Brooklyn was born I felt like I should write a heartfelt, touching, tear producing post about the instant joys of becoming a grandparent. But as wonderful as this week has been, the truth is, I felt a little numb, almost like I was stuck in a dream and any minute I’d wake up, and poof! Meagan would still be pregnant and we’d still be waiting for a baby. I was feeling kind of bad about the way I felt, like I was already failing as a grandparent until Doug expressed the same feelings. I’m not sure why it affected us like this. We’re guessing it may be because we’d been waiting for Brooklyn since the kids lost unborn baby Kiley last spring.  Basically this child has been anticipated for eighteen long months, during which time we also lost my mother to a terrible, year long illness.

Years ago, Andy once told me how to remember which direction tightens and which one loosens things; righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. Now when I go out to water my flowers and I turn the hose spigot on and off, I often say it silently to myself, righty-tighty, lefty-loosey and I’d begun to wonder if it was possible for our emotions to turn on and off in the same way. I suppose I was expecting a lightning bolt of happiness to strike me the moment I held Brooklyn for the first time at the hospital, that my newfound love for her would wake me up, would fill me up and make me believe that I actually deserved to be happy. But Doug and I both left the hospital the day she was born in a bit of a daze.

Today we had to go over and babysit Brooklyn so that Andy could take Meagan to the doctor’s for complications from the epidural. At one point, I took the baby into her room to change her. After she was cleaned up, I swaddled her in a blanket so that only her head was peeking out and I picked her up. She started to fuss so I began rocking gently back and forth and talking to her in that instinctive, sing-song mommy voice women seem to be born with. Brooklyn quieted down. She began to study my face carefully and then she smiled, the sweetest, purest little smile and that was my moment. It didn’t happen in a brightly lit, crowded hospital room, but alone in the silence of a darkened nursery. And it was not so much a bolt of lightning, but a gentle lefty-loosey, a gift from the tiny pink lips of my first grandchild that went straight to my heart.

teaser tuesdays

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Teaser Tuesday asks you to : Grab your current read, Open to a random page, Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page. That’s my first grandchild, baby Brooklyn, posing yesterday for her very first portrait! Meagan is having contractions and if the baby isn’t born on her own they will go to the hospital on Wednesday so the docs can help can get things moving along more quickly. When I picked up After This by Alice McDermott just now, the first (I so swear!) sentence I read was in the middle of page 33: Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of them both – the baby unseen, moving and elbow or a foot, the means to an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a conversation forever unheard.