Marley & Me - 2nd Edition

After seeing the movie Marley & Me last week, I realized I had a younger, minature version on my hands at home.... Ria and family are always asking "how's Hazel?" to which I usually give a response causing their next statement to be "you don't like her very much do you?" Katelyn and Kennedy came to spend the night last Saturday and make the trek to Buffalo with us the next day and got a first hand experience of why I respond the way I do! The pics give a teensy indication to their own agony with the little rascal....Being awakened by the little furry beast, trying to hide so she doesn't claw your eyes out (yup that's Kate's skinny little butt sticking in the air with her head buried in her pillow), having Hazel fake "oh I'm such a calm puppy" on the car ride so she could ride on Kate's lap and finally even wearing KATELYN the dog lover of all dog lovers out!

Come Rain, Shine or Blizzard

Didn't get your Fargo Forum this morning? Call this man. After a 12 hr. bus trip to Fergus Falls yesterday with the Fargo High Swim Team, Richie left for the Forum at 1:00 AM this morning to get his 130 carriers out with the Sunday Forum. This is him coming home at 11:00 am...after digging out several carriers and a few neighbors along the way. All he wants for Christmas is some snowpants and a face mask. He called his Mom in Mpls. to tell her he'd never seen anything like it. She told him to come home. Good thing they shut down I-94 or he'd be heading southeast.

Road Trip

Alot of the time life with Richard is like taking a kid to the toy store for the very first time. His prior 50 yrs. has been pretty much filled up with nothing but work, work & more work. Give the man a new wife with 2 adult married children and 7 grandkids and 3 doggies, move him to Fargo and his world is forever changed. Now every time I get him to venture outside his small tunnel world and try something new, I'm the one ending up shaking my head and grinning on the sidelines. For instance, last Saturday he took his first ever extra-curricular bus trip with wrestling kids from Fargo.... to what he thought was the end of the earth...Grand Forks ND. They gave him a flat nose bus, only 1/2 a tank of gas, and loaded it up with over 70 kids and told him to head north. What's funny is to listen to his stories of the experience....cuz he forgets that I've been doing that for the last 25 yrs. of my life! I drove up there to meet him and take up some of his wait time and had to chuckle while he told me "ya know the moms bring food into these tournaments... they bring these great big crockpots of sloppy joes and then sell these fantastic home made bars for only 50 cents"! I swear the man has been living under a rock his entire life before me. Anyway, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Carter play his first "road trip" hockey game at the Ralph Engelstad arena on the olympic sheet of ice. What fun was that for him! Sunday we got up at 4:30 am and trekked on down to Buffalo to attend the Elton G'kids Christmas program at their church. This was Richard's 2nd ever kid's Christmas program and once again he was amazed at how the little ones could memorize their lines and songs. I was amazed at how when I handed the Big E my car keys to play with during the service he looked up at me and said outloud plain as day "I drive your car Grandma?" How can someone not even 2 talk like that? Delaney and Jillian sang a cute duet and it was the bestest, as were their adorable dresses and sparkly shoes!

Happy 50th Ishaugs!

So my sister e-mailed looking for pics from my trip to Jamaica on my blog....... so now that my recovery is sorta complete, guess I'll try and talk about it.

My dad always talked about taking his kids and grandkids to Hawaii together someday. The closest he ever got to completing that dream was gathering them all up in his RV on a hot day back in August of 1992 and heading south down to Valley Fair, as his life was cut short just a few short months after that. I can still remember him lining us all up in the VF parking lot outside his RV and handing us each $15 for snacks during the day, telling us there was more if we needed it.....he'd be waiting at the nearest park bench people watching since his bum leg didn't allow him the ability to walk all day around Valley Fair and he wasn't the kind of older man to let us push in him a wheel chair around the park. I also remember him saying "what the hell" as he made the decision to board the Cork Screw ride... much to our surprise. When he got off he'd lost his glasses from the pocket of his shirt when the ride went upside down...even though, he seemed so happy that day to have us all together... enjoying the day watching his grandkids go from ride to ride. I never quite understood why until I had grandkids of my own, and have always had that same desire to take them on a trip all together as he did.

So, way back last January when the Ishaug family called me up to say they thought of me as one of the family and were booking their trip to Jamaica, and would I please go along....I decided to say yes, partly to honor my father in doing something with their family he never got to do with his. DeLyle and Marlene were only children and had 3 daughters of their own, so rather than have the usual 50th wedding anniversary gathering at their local church, their dream was for their entire family to take a trip to the Carribean together. Hence, my Thanksgiving was spent trying to eat goat & ox tail rather than turkey and mashed potatos and paddling in the ocean watching the Macy's Day parade on the big screen of the cruise ship docked across the bay rather than watching football in Ria's living room.

I knew I was in trouble the minute the plane landed... and the runway was as close to the ocean as Jim's house is to Lake Lida....the waves from the jet skier that cruised by pretty much splashed right up on my window of the plane. I was uncomfortable. Well actually, I knew I was in trouble at Hector when they put that label on my bag and said it was already "overweight". It only got worse. The first stop of the bus on the ride to Ocho Rios was supposed to be at what they called a cute little roadside diner...I was hoping to get a Coke... instead what I got was several offers to buy some fresh mary jane and a first hand view of the plant it came from. The sun never came out the entire 7 days...I never took a dip under the water in the pool and the ocean had such creepy, crawly things in it everyone who went swimming there ended up in the nurse's station. The humidity in the rooms never got below 90%, the room had the most minature collection of ants I've ever seen, and the food? well...let's just say I ate alot of fruit. There were 29 of us who went....ages 3 to 76. and every single one of us hopped on that sailboat, headed out to the deep sea and consumed alot of rum. It took me almost a week to feel the the floors beneath my feet weren't still moving as I walked. It was an 18 hr. day to get back home.. I sat in row 15 from Montego Bay to Memphis and due to the stormy weather, the entire plane from row 17 back barfed on the way back... they had to borrow our barf bags...you can imagine how fun the plane smelled.. they closed down the bathrooms. Wally, the oldest of the group, cut his hand and the emergency fire dept had to show up at the Mpls. airport, firetrucks, sirens and all to stitch him up. Wally is also the person in the pic below who the lifeguard is rescuing as he's drowning from going off the water slide .....while we all just stand and watch .....yes, Wally who's 76, has one lung, a stent in his main heart artery, and skin cancer decided for some fun he'd try out the water slide...yup, that pretty much sums up the entire trip. I think taking the grandkids all to Valley Fair next summer sounds like a better idea :-)