Almost a week

Posted on December 28, 2005
Filed Under Uncategorized |

It’s been almost a week since I have updated here and almost a week since my father-in-law died. And what a week!
It is not easy organising a funeral with Christmas right in the middle of things! But for the most part it is all organised and ready for tomorrow, just little things to take care of now and just to get our heads around what we are about to do.

It’s been almost surreal this Christmas.

The girls are heavily into presents and the unwrapping of them, though on Christmas morning ’seeweall’ (cereal) was more important that presents - and as anyone who knows my girls would know, putting their stomachs first is not that unusual! But after some ’seeweall’ they got into the unwrapping good and proper. Not tooo many pressies from us just a few bits and pieces to start the day, and ofcourse the $1.99 pack of plastic dinosaurs won out above all else.

Izzy unwrapping the first round of pressies Christmas morning

Zoe unwrapping her ”doodlepro” which Daddy has used more than she has!

After the first round of pressies and the horrible realisation that the girls had unwrapped everything there was in our house we were all keen to get going. So we packed ourselves into the truck and headed in to S-A’s (my step MIL). Since I have known the Baldy Boy we have never spent Christmas day with his Dad and S-A - we always saw them before Christmas day or a quick visit around breakfast on our way to other family members… but this year we spent the whole entire day with S-A and everyone came. It was VERY odd arriving there knowing my FIL wouldn’t be there but at the same time just felt like the right thing to be doing.

It was a long day with a few tears here and there but mostly some nice memories and having fun with the littlies. The girls were ofcourse in heaven getting more presents and getting to help everyone else unwrap theirs!

Then by around 6 o’clock when everyone was getting well over tired we headed off to my parents place for some dinner, yet more presents and some sleeeeeeeeeeep! My best present of the day was my Mum coming up and getting the girls in the morning so both The Baldy Boy and I could sleep in TOGETHER!

Since then we’ve been back and forth a lot organising things… and man can you do a lot of thinking on a 45 minute trip up to the city! In no particular order here is a list of things that popped into my head on one or other drive that I want to make sure I remember to do…

1) Take more photos!
We have precious few photos of the girls with their grampy because he was mostly too sick to hold them since they were born and I so regret that now. So I am making a pact here and now to take more photos of everyone! Of people we love, of people who drive us nuts… of anyone even slightly important in our lives… even more photos of me!

2)Write to my girls.
Organising someone else’s funeral makes you think a lot about what you’d like to have happen when you die and one of the things that keeps coming back to me is that I have things I want the girls to know. So I am thinking of writing my girls a letter each year or keeping a special journal for them of all the things I want them to know about.

3)Dance more.
We don’t dance and sing and listen to enough music. It is soooooooooooo good for the soul to just let yourself go every once in a while and just throw yourself into the music, whether it be happy or sad.

4)Make sure my girls have memories of Grampy
My girls will grow up barely remembering their Grampy, and any future children we have will not get to meet him at all. I grew up not knowing my paternal grandfather and still barely know anything about him, I don’t want it to be like that for my girls. So I need to come up with ways to share memories of my FIL so that my children will always ‘know’ him in some way

5)Start collecting memories from the past
Over the past few years I’ve watched my Nan loose more and more of her memory and I’ve seen the dementia set in. One of Si’s Nans is also like this and this past week has reminded me how easy it is to loose the memories from the past. I have been looking at old photos of my Nan’s, some of them of people that my Mum doesn’t know and now my Nan isn’t able to tell us either. But the stories we do have and the memories we still have need to be collected and recorded now.

I am sure there are more things I want to ad to my list but that will do for now…. I expect the girls will be awake soon and we need to run up to the shops before we start on some cooking for tomorrow.

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