Grandma and LaRue Bake Cookies!

Grandma & LaRue bake cookies!

On Friday, June 27th, I helped LaRue bake Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies. Mmmmm! They were so delicious! LaRue is quite the little kitchen helper for just being 4 years old. I measured the ingredients and LaRue dumped them into the bowl. She and I mixed the cookie batter together and she and I took turns using the cookie scoop to drop cookies onto the cookie sheet. That cookie scoop was hard for her to squeeze with her little hands but she did it 'all by herself!' When we were all done she said, 'Let's clean up Grandma!' She 'wanted' to do the dishes! LaRue is very helpful. She does not like being messy! She likes her hands to stay clean. I think that's why she loves doing dishes! It keeps her hands clean! I enjoyed the time LaRue and I spent together this afternoon baking cookies!

Tillie loves ice cream!

A picture is worth a thousand words! As you can see from the picture Tillie loves ice cream!

We were eating Tillamook Udderly Chocolate ice cream. Mmmm, good! She would have a mountain of ice cream on her spoon and try to fit half of it in her mouth! She would pick up a fistful and put it in her mouth. I kept telling Lisa, "Oh my goodness, I would have an ice cream headache! My hand would be frozen. Look at her. It doesn't bother her in the least!" She ate a bowlful!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #16

Story #16 - The Swimming Pool – I nearly drowned – those darn boys!
Do you like to go swimming? Isn’t it the best fun!

My father built a swimming pool in our back yard. I was probably about 5 or 6 years old when it was built. Living in southwest New Mexico it got very hot in the summer. It was not uncommon for the temperature to hang around 100 degrees in July and August. It was a dry heat. If you were sweaty from working, you just stood still and the hot sun would bake you dry! There wasn’t any humidity in the air. The pool seemed huge to me at that age. When I was older I realized it wasn’t that big. My dad and brothers helped dig out the big hole. It was probably about 5 feet deep and 15 by 25 feet in diameter. He over-layed it all in concrete. Now that I think about it that must have cost a fortune back then! He built a one-foot high wall around the entire top edge of the pool to make it a little deeper and also we could sit on the sides. He built a three by three-foot pump area and the filter kept the water clean. He also had a sidewalk of concrete paved around the entire pool. Let me tell you in that hot sun it burned our bare feet. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time standing on that concrete! It sure was nice though when you wanted to dry off. We would lay our towels down on the hot concrete and we would be dry in no time!

We had so much fun playing in that pool! My dad had some old inner tubes from car tires. We pumped those up with air and then played on those in the pool. You could bend them and sit on them like ponies and we had a ball! We tried to pull each other off of them. One day my father brought home an airplane tire tube. At 6 years old that seemed HUGE! Six kids could sit on that tube. We had so much fun with that. Two of us would stand up on the tube and keep balanced and someone else would push us across the pool. We would stand on the wall edge of the pool and dive through that tube. What fun! Well my brothers were all sitting on the tube with their legs dangling through the middle of it, the hole, and I was swimming under the water. We would swim back and forth under the water across the pool. We would dive for things. We kept our eyes open. That wasn’t good because they would get red from the chlorine in the pool. Well I was swimming under the water and had to come up for air. When I tried to come up my head bumped into the bottom on that huge tube. Then I would move and try to come up again. I bumped my head again on the tube. I was running out of air! I made it over to where the ladder was and came up. I gulped in enough air to gasp for breath. Then I screamed at the top of my lungs at my brothers. “You’re trying to kill me! You want to drown me!” They denied that! What was I talking about! They didn’t see me! I ran into the house and told my mom what they did. She came out to investigate. My brothers honestly told her that they did not know I was under there and did not see me. Well I was sure they were trying to drown me! She told us all to be more careful and LOOK where they were going. I can look back on that now and realize they were just having fun and not paying attention and probably didn’t feel that little bump under the airplane tire tube. It was big! They were kicking their legs to get the tube to move across the water. Well after that happened I was a lot more careful when I was under water!

On a side note—we would get brown as Indians from swimming in the summer. My dad said the only white patch we had was where our swimsuits covered! Our hair would bleach out white blonde from the sun. We must have looked funny with our very blue eyes, blonde white hair and very brown skin! The town where we lived had a population that was 60% Mexican, 40% Caucasian.

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #15

Story #15 Chores – The paper bag and the tumbleweed

I mentioned in story #14 about having to do chores. I hated chores! My brothers were not too thrilled about them either. I’m sure you’ve heard your parents tell you that chores teach you responsibility. I heard that too. I also told that to my kids. It does teach you responsibility. It also teaches you about teamwork and working together.

My older brothers had to mow the grass and all of us had to ‘pull weeds’. Yuck! My mom would pass out a paper bag and we had to fill that paper bag with weeds. Then she would look to see what kind of a job we did and if we did a good job, ‘we were done!’ If we didn’t do a good job, we worked longer and she saw to it that we did a better job! We had this one weed called ‘goat heads’ and they were thorny little buggers. They spread out across the ground and then they would bloom pretty little yellow flowers and those flowers turned into a little flattened thorns. They hurt like the dickens if you stepped bare foot onto them. If they were dried thorns, they stuck into your feet and you would have to pull them out. Ouch! It was dry where we lived, and when it rained, the weeds grew like mad! These were mostly the weeds we had to pull one particular day.

In the summer, we usually started out early in the mornings around 8:00a.m. to do our chores because it got too hot by 11:00a.m. and then you pretty much stayed in the shade, if you could find some, or stayed indoors. My twin brother Gayle got done awfully fast and I was still working on filling my paper bag. Our bags would hold about one gallon of weeds. He didn’t like pulling weeds any better than I did. I couldn’t imagine how he could get done so fast. He sat in the cool shade while I worked. My mom came out to check on us and asked Gayle why he was sitting there not working while the rest of us were. He told her that he finished! She told him to bring his bag to her and let her see. Sure enough there were weeds and it felt a little heavy. So she poured out the bag and what do you suppose she found? A tumbleweed with a few rocks on the bottom of the bag and a few weeds on the top and the tumbleweed was in the middle. How very clever! Only mom didn’t think that was very clever at all. She made him pick ‘two bags’ of weeds for being dishonest and lying to her! Gayle could be sly and sneaky only this time it got him in trouble! I didn’t share his same talent. It never occurred to me that you could cheat when doing chores! Gayle wasn’t too happy about getting into trouble and picking twice the amount and he didn’t get done as quick this time. I was just glad I didn’t do that and I hurried and got my bag filled and sat in the shade and watched him!

Why I love 'Blogging!'

Blogging

I find that term interesting. Why is it called 'Blogging???'

I love it! A month ago in Relief Society, the first Sunday-when it's the presidency message, we were talking about how to keep in touch. I raised my hand and told them about how my daughters and I have 'blog' pages and how my oldest daughter walked me through the steps to get started over the phone. There were a few 'ahhs' and a few 'what's that?' They know, having been their former RS Pres. a few years back, that I am pro computer and all about the internet!I had made the VT routes all via internet with the exception of a very few who did not have a computer or internet. One 'click' and your route has been reported! They are on their 3rd RS Pres since my departure and they are still using the internet VT reporting! That's progress!

Now that I have digressed a bit, I do love the internet for keeping in touch! It's so great. I love clicking on the blogs and catching up. I click on my grand kids' pictures and via a 'click' transport them to their family My Picture files! :o) I love going to Drop Shots and seeing the pictures and videos they post. I love their scrapbooking pages as well! Being a long distance grandmother is not fun I can tell you. Keeping them a 'click' away and seeing them and their families makes my heart swell! I am always amazed how fast they are growing up and how tall they are getting. Not too far and they'll start being teenagers, wonderful young people! :o)

Our kids gave dad and I a 'Digital Picture Frame' for a Mothers/Fathers Day gift. We love it! Soon I am going to have to add more pictures to it as I've been collecting more photos.

I'm not much into My Space or Face book. To me, blog does the same thing. I'm a grandma, and sometimes I learn slow and have to have my daughters grin and bear a few repetitious steps on computer things, but God bless them! I love 'learning!' It keeps your mind from getting mushy!

Thanks to my wonderful children who help me keep learning!

Love,
Mom :o)

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #14

Story #14 - Duck Pond Soup

I wonder what picture comes to your mind when you think of ‘Duck Pond Soup’? Do you think of ducks on a pond or do you think of ducks sitting in your bowl of soup?

I was probably about 12 or 13 years old. We had some friends by that last name of Murray. They had 6 or 7 kids and were Catholic. The 2nd to the oldest in their family was named Michael. He was one year older than my twin brother and I. I had a crush (it means I liked him) on him. He liked me too! We had chores to do everyday during the summer and on weekends when school was in session. Michael would come over sometimes in the summer and help my brother and I get our chores done, mostly for my sake, so we could all play and Michael could spend more time with me.

They lived in a small apartment in town and then later they moved out to a big farmhouse west of town out by the old cotton gin. It was a much bigger house and accommodated the size of their family a lot better. That was such fun to play at their house, both inside the house and outside in the yard. My twin brother and I rode our bikes across town, over the railroad tracks and out to their house. It was probably a three-mile ride to their house from our house. If it happened to be lunchtime when we played, she would invite my brother and I to eat with them. My favorite was her ‘Duck Pond Soup.’ We never had anything like that at our house. It was mashed potatoes with a scoop out of the middle to make room for the pond. Then she would pour alphabet soup or vegetable soup into the scooped out pond. It would fill with soup. Billie, the mom’s name, said that she just invented the name. It made it fun for her kids.
It tasted wonderful! It was so good! We’d tell our mother about it and she would be very kind and say, “They have a lot of kids so this is probably a good way to stretch their food budget.” Well, at my age, the last thing I thought of was ‘budgets’ and what did that all mean??? I just knew it tasted good and wanted her to make it. She never did.

My mom did make us another dish that I loved. I guess you could say this was a poor man’s dish too. She would cook cracked wheat and make cooked cereal. I was not especially fond of it. However, she would take the left over cooked cereal and pour it into a bread loaf pan. Then she put it in the refrigerator. The next morning she would slice it into one-inch thick slices and fry it in a pan and then pour warmed Log Cabin Syrup over it. Mmmm, it was sooo good! I loved it fixed that way!

Well moving forward to adult years---Julie and Lisa had their wisdom teeth taken out together on the same day one half hour apart from each other. Julie was 18 and Lisa was 16. It’s not fun having your wisdom teeth pulled. Your jaw gets swollen and it’s hard to eat anything. Well I fixed them ‘Duck Pond Soup!’ I used alphabet soup. They thought that tasted sooo good. I made a lot for them.

In February of this year (2008) we lost power and we had no electricity for almost 5 days! That meant we had no heat. Fortunately we had a gas stove. You can strike a match and turn the burner on and it will light. So I was able to cook things on the stovetop. I made ‘Duck Pond Soup’ and I think it was the first time dad (Grandpa Neil) ever ate it. He liked it! I’ve made it several times since. It’s a really easy meal to fix for Kirsten too and she loves it!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl- #13

Story #13 - My favorite book - A Sort of a Sage by Bill Mauldin

I read this book when I was about 13 years old and I loved it! My father read it and would tell us snippets of the story here and there. He had got the book and we had it for years. Later when I was married and moved up to Oregon, I checked it out of a library and read it again. I laughed as much that time as I did when I read it at age 13. Bill Mauldin lived near Cloudcroft, New Mexico, which was about half an hour from where we lived. He grew up there. He served in World War II in the Army. He later became a cartoonist and his cartoons were syndicated in the newspapers. Some of his cartoons were war characters and other times they were political figures. His cartoons were always funny. He also wrote a book called ‘Up Front’ and ‘Back Home’ (printed before ‘A Sort of A Saga’) that were about his war stories and how life was when he returned home. I enjoyed ‘A Sort of A Saga’ the berst of all!

His book ‘A Sort of A Saga’ was so funny! He told stories about when he grew up. I guess the reason I liked it so well was because I knew what he was talking about as we lived kind of in the same area. One of his stories I remember was---A neighbor that lived down the road from Bill had an old 2-door sedan probably 1929 or 30’s model. We’ll get back to this guy in a minute---Bill’s friend caught a skunk and de-sacked it and put the skunk musk in a bottle. The problem was that it stunk so badly! They buried it in Bill’s backyard. They wondered what they should do with it. They wrote a letter to Sears and Roebuck Co. and said that they had ‘skunk musk’ and would they be interested in purchasing it for their perfume. They heard that musk helps perfume cling better. Musk was supposed to be valuable. They waited two weeks and did not hear a word from either Sears or Wards and gave up on the idea and kept the musk ‘buried!’ So much for striking it rich selling skunk musk! Ha! Ha! I thought that was so funny! Well, they didn’t know what to do with it.

Now-- Back to the neighbor with his car. About 3 times a week in the evenings Bill’s folks had friends over at their house and they played bridge. Bill and his brother Sid had to go to bed while the adults played bridge and Bill and his brother didn’t like that too much. This guy with the car had a big voice and was rather loud and obnoxious. Bill and his brother Sid didn’t particularly like this guy; perhaps it was just because he was loud and obnoxious. The guy didn’t exactly talk in a low voice, it boomed! One particular night while in bed the ‘voice’ was loud and Bill’s dad told him that the kids were sleeping and try to keep the noise down. The guy with the ‘big voice’ said that if kids worked hard all day that they would be so tired that they would probably be sleeping already. Well Bill and his brother Sid heard that and didn’t like it. So they slipped out of bed and snuck outside to the guy’s car. Bill wanted to smear the skunk musk all over those new leather car seats. His brother Sid had a much better idea. He put some down the carburetor. They snuck back to bed. Well the next time the guy drove he had to roll down his windows. He thought he hit a skunk and checked his whole car over top to bottom and end-to-end but could not find the skunk. So all winter long he had to drive his car with the windows down because he couldn’t stand the skunk smell. I thought that was so funny!

After writing this story, I went to Amazon.com and found there were still copies available. So for $5.95 plus $3.99 shipping-a total of $9.94, I ordered it. It came in the mail and I read it in 2 days! If any of my children or grandchildren is interested in reading it they can borrow it from me. It sure is entertaining reading!

Book-'A Sort of A Saga'- entertaining reading!

I just finished reading this book, 'A Sort of A Saga' by Bill Mauldin. It's 301 pages and has lots of cartoon pictures that he himself drew for this book relating to his stories that he tells. It was printed in 1949 for $3.50. I just bought it on Amazon and I love it! I bought it, hardback, for $5.95 plus shipping. It's entertaining to read! I laughed all the way through it! Just ask your dad. I had to make several, ummm, potty stops, and enjoyed the book immensely!

I grew up in the southwest in southern New Mexico. The book takes place not far from where we lived. It also has a few chapters when they lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area. I highly recommend this book for reading. If you can't get it at your local library I would be happy to loan it to you. My dad read the book and I read it when he was finished. I was 13 at the time. I read it again around age 30 and now I've read it a third time. I never tire of the humor it offers!I read it in two days. I do have to say, it does have a few swear words in it, but nothing horribly vulgar. I think J. Golden Kimball would have loved Bill Mauldin's dad!