I made myself exhausted trying to clean house for the memorial. The house hadn't had a good scrub down since before I started working on my craft room. The whole house was dusty, so I tried to take a lot of our rugs and stuff outside for the sun to kill those little dust bunnies. It seemed to help a lot. But heck, I had to dust, then vacuum, then dust, then move something, then dust again. Yuck! Abby's room got an overhaul too. Why is it so hard to clean your kid's room while they're in it?? So I had to evict Abby the day I truly tackled her room. Oy! But I'm glad I did. Not only was it thoroughly played in while company was over, but it's managed to stay clean since. Hooray! Unfortunately, I'm now fighting off a cold and a muscle cramp in my leg that won't go away. Sigh.
Old age is fun, isn't it?!?
Abby is out of school now. She's "bored."
She's doing great with our new puppy, Bailey. Yep, we agreed on Bailey. When we decided to tackle having a dog, we knew we would need to train the dog, and clean up accidents, and spend money on the darn thing. But one of the things I don't think we truly realized was that we would need to train Abby as well as the dog. That has been a challenge. Bailey is doing well enough with us. She "knows" a couple tricks and stuff (like sit, down, out, speak, roll over, come, stay, go outside, go inside, and go potty) but can't perform them 100% of the time. Same with potty training. We think she "knows" she shouldn't go in the house, but she can't quite get there. Right now we're struggling with "submissive" peeing. However, with Abby, we have another set of problems. Abby laughs at Bailey's antics or misbehaviors and generally gets her riled up or distracted from "good" behavior. Plus, Bailey loves to really nip at Abby's ankles and heels when they race through the house together. But Abby hates it, squeals, and then runs away from Bailey to hide. We've tried over and over to explain to Abby that Bailey thinks that's another game and not that she's doing something wrong. Oh woe is me and Lee.
Bailey all scruffy looking after a bath:
When we told Abby that Kevin had died, Abby just nodded to herself and said she understood. That was it. We watched her closely for a while to see if there would be any other emotions or outbursts of any kind. Nope. She was fine. Abby had only met Kevin about 4 times in the last year, so she didn't really know him. She also didn't ask any questions or anything. I felt something was missing from the whole exchange so I gave Lee a hug. I don't know what else I expected from a 5 year old, but I felt that a hug was missing, I guess.
The memorial get together went well. There was a lot of catching up with family we hadn't seen in a while, there was good food (and even better - good wine), and Abby got to play with some other little ones including my niece’s 10 month old - awwwwwww, too cute. And, of course, everyone went "awwwwwwwwwwww" when they saw Bailey. All the moms started snapping photos of the kids with Bailey. I know it was a little bit of a distraction, but I can't help think that at such a time, a positive reaffirmation of life is a good thing.
Abby and her second cousin:
Lee created a most excellent slide show set to some of Kevin's favorite, and appropriate to the occasion, music. Lee's sister had dug out a ton of old photos, so Lee had great material to work with. He also had to Photoshop out some staining and even pen marks on some of the photos. I, for one, was really impressed with the outcome. It made me cry, and I know it got to everyone else there too. He put it on a CD and gave them out to anyone who wanted a copy. We also took a moment to share some good time memories of Kevin with the group.
All in all, it was low key and just good for the family to take a moment to say good bye together.
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