Going dotty

My grandma passed away last week so DH and I attended the homegoing service this past weekend.  I was not at all sad at her passing as she had been suffering from dementia for many years.  Her health had declined a lot in the last year and her memory was so bad that she could no longer remember her kids most of the time.  But she knew Jesus as her Lord and Savior and is now in heaven with Him.  I am glad for her homegoing as her memory was so bad that she's really been away from us all for many years except in body.

Funerals are usually family reunions, and this one was no exception.  My grandpa (my grandma's husband who passed away over ten years ago) was the oldest boy of sixteen children, fourteen of whom made it to adulthood.  All of these children are gone except for the youngest, my Great Uncle Johnny who is 87 years old.  We picked him up and gave him a ride to the funeral.

Uncle Johnny has always loved my grandma.  When he was a boy of eighteen finishing up his last year of high school, my grandparents took him in (my grandpa was 20 years older than his little brother Johnny!).  My mom was a baby at the time.  Uncle Johnny remembers my grandma as a very kind and loving lady (which she was!).

Uncle Johnny married late and he and his wife had their first child a couple of months after my mom had me.  My mom always thought it was weird that she had a baby at the same time as one of her uncles.  

A lot of the children of these fourteen kids were at the funeral.  And yeah, they're all adults now and most of them are way older than me.  Most of them.  My cousin Jeff was there.  Even though one of his parents was of the "original fourteen" (I can never remember which one), he was born when his mom was in her late-forties and he is a few years younger than me.  

I had fun catching up with him.  He retired from "show biz" several years ago and is enjoying a new job that can best be described as helping investors with mergers and acquisitions.  He was an actor for a children's educational program for many years and loved it.  He retired shortly after the show was bought out by an "evil" company.  

And I got to see my nephews.  We had lunch together at a restaurant and while we were waiting for our food, my oldest nephew and I played tic-tac-toe.  It was not fun because neither one of us won; the games kept ending in a tie.  (My nephew said this was because we were both "too smart.")  So I taught my nephew how to play "Dots."  I have to confess that I used to play it with my lab partner in high school anatomy all the time on the sly because we thought our teacher was boring.

Anyway, if you've never played "Dots," you play it on paper by filling a page with dots in a grid and then you take turns drawing one line between two dots.  If you draw a line to finish a box, then the box is yours and you get to draw another line.  The winner is the one with the most boxes.  My nephew caught on quickly and thought this was great fun.  

And my youngest nephew and I played a rousing game of "This Little Piggy" with his toes on the way home in the car.  And once we got home to my parents' house, Emma scared him into raucous screams with her enthusiastic greeting.  But she calmed down and so did he.  ;-)

I finished "Betty Broomstick" last week and here she is!  She is stitched on my 28 count hand-dyed Lime Green linen by Zweigart with my DMC and with specialty fibers and embellishments included in the kit.

And I started on a new project - "Homespun Hollow" by Linda Myers.  I've always liked this design and the colors in it.  So far it is a fun stitch.

LoneStar