Good, Clumsy and Sad!

Yesterday was quite the day for me with things happening that kind of fit all three of those words above.

First up -the good.

I was invited to a birthday party for a lady who was my neighbor for many, many years -from the time I was born until oh, about five years or so ago. She was one of the women on our street who served, in a manner of speaking, as another mother to me -in the manner that Hilary Clinton wrote about in her book, "It Takes a Village." She, like all the other women along this street, raised not just their own children, but looked out for the neighbor children, even to disciplining them at times if they saw any of us doing something really bad or wrong.

But about 4-5 years ago, she decided that the house she had was just way too big for her to maintain, to even need for one person and the amount of yard work involved had started to become overwhelming to a woman in her early eighties and so she sold the house and moved into a senior citizen complex over in Clearfield.

Yesterday though, her daughter-in-law organized a little surprise for her in the form of a small birthday party to honor her on the occasion of her 87th birthday. As such, two of my neighbors and I -along with several other women from our church, were invited to a little get-together for her -very low-key, very nice though.

Initially, I thought Mandy had to work the afternoon shift yesterday so when I had told Mary Kaye -the organizer -that I would be attending I had also said I might have to bring both the grandkids with me and make it a quick visit then to the party cause with the grandkids, ya know, things may not always work out as peacefully as one would like. However, the way things worked, Mandy didn't have to go to work until 6 p.m. so I could go to the party alone if I wished. But I had mentioned this event to Maya earlier that she (and Kurtis) might be going with me and she was rather looking forward to it, so I ended up taking her while Kurtis remained at home with Mandy.

This was something that could have been an instant recipe for disaster if Maya had decided not to be on her best behavior but I'm happy to say that she did very well there -considering the only other person attending who was under 65 years of age -besides Maya -would have been our minister, Pastor Carrie!

She was polite, relatively quiet, not jabbering constantly or annoyingly to me or anyone else there and she was also quite attentive to being careful around Mary Kaye's beautifully decorated home too! I told Mandy when we got home that she'd been as angelic as any six-year-old could possibly come close to being!
Here's a picture of the guest of honor -Ruth -seated in front of the door -and around the table (l-t-r) are former neighbor, Kate, then Ruth's niece, Marlene, to her right and another former neighbor, Shirley. Actually, these four women and myself lived by or very near to Ruth most of our lives.
And here's Maya -all dressed up and being her very best little self -sitting beside an antique mama/papa doll that hostess Mary Kaye had allowed her to play with.

Can you tell how proud I was -still am -of how well she comported herself yesterday?

When we got home though, things sort of went a bit down hill though but not from anything Maya did or said but rather because I apparently had bit off a bit of a "clumsy" pill and it seemed for a while anything I came near or touched was doomed to cause me a problem.

First, there was the kitchen sink and the spigot there. The faucet is one that is rather high and if you aren't careful when you turn the water on and if there is something in the sink, the way the water may hit an item in the sink can really turn nasty on you in a heartbeat! I went to turn the spigot on, not paying any attention to a ladle laying in the sink and when the water hit that ladle, the velocity then caused the water to begin to spray out, all over the darned counter and the floor! By the time I managed to get over to the handle and turn it off, it almost looked like I'd been trying to flood the kitchen. This, obviously, wasn't one of my finer moves of the day as I then had to mop up all this water from the kitchen floor before doing anything else then -like cook supper!

As I started to cook, I began to take dishes out of the drainer and put them away and in the process of doing that, I picked up a coffee mug that my son had bought for me when he was 12 years old and had spent three weeks that summer visiting in Florida with his Godparents. This mug was a very pretty cup -on the thin side and not like the regular coffee mugs -and had delicate pink flowers on it as well as a little writing about "Mother" and it was something so sentimental in value to me that I could have cried on the spot when I picked it up and felt it slipping from my grasp and it went crashing down then into the sink and shattered. Glass pieces flying and I was beginning to think maybe I almost needed to be wearing safety glasses and other protective clothing ya know!

I got the glass cleaned up from that broken cup and went back to fixing supper and in the process, reaching for my salt shaker, I managed to bump the top of my hand on the corner of the cupboard near the stove and that little bump which to most people probably wouldn't even leave a bruise, with my skin on my hands seeming to be almost paper thin nowadays, I ended up with a little three-corner type nick cut in the top of my hand. Not something drastic as injuries go, but one that does tend to bleed -a lot -so then I had to stop what I was doing, get the darned cut cleaned off and go find a big bandaid to put over the top of my hand to keep from getting blood all over my clothes and anything else in my way!

Thanks goodness the party was the first thing on my agenda yesterday and it went very well cause if I'd had the other things happen to me first, I'd really would have been a total nervous wreck the rest of the day!

Hope I forget where the heck those darned clumsy pills are hidden!