Visiting with Gma in Blanding & Lissy's birthday

This weekend we headed to Blanding to visit with Grandma and Grandpa Fisher. My camera is broken so I unfortunately have no pictures.

It was also Lissy's 5th birthday. I bought a cake at the local grocery store there for her birthday, and Kulani bought her some simple presents from us. I love that a kite and coloring book and crayons is as special to a 5-year-old as a new car would be to a teenager. She told me it was her best birthday ever. Last year for her birthday we spent $100 taking the kids to Princesses on Ice. It was a good reminder that sometimes the simplest birthdays are truly the best.

Grandma Fisher isn't doing great. She mostly sat on the couch the whole time we were there. The girls amazingly played so well with all of her old toys that were collected for the older grandkids, but thankfully still linger for my kids. We played Huskerdu and Candyland. I got to take a nice nap with Nohea. Despite no TV being on, the girls behaved so well and played well with each other. Kulani said he thinks the girls must have some inner behavior modifier, and they must instinctively know when good manners are required. They seem to understand old people, as they are also very well behaved when we visit Grandma McEuen at the care center.

While we were there, I was looking through some old scrapbooks Grandma had compiled. She'd kept some letters her husband had written to his mother when he was first married and living in Salt Lake City, and his mom was in Hawaii. One letter had me cracking up. Grandpa Fisher wrote to his mom about his success on the neighborhood baseball team. He wrote about the intricacies of being the catcher and hitting the ball left handed. The majority of the letter was about his baseball glory. And then in the last paragraph, he mentions that his wife is pregnant. A woman would lead a letter with news like that.

Grandma's memory is getting pretty bad. She asked me at least a dozen times whose birthday it was. She's remembering things not as they happened but how she thought they happened. She thinks she was in some type of coma for two weeks this summer, but that never happened.

When we left, Grandpa, who usually isn't super forthcoming with praise, was effusive with his gratitude for visiting. He said Grandma usually just stays in her room all day. It was a relief for him to see his wife interacting with people and getting some type of activity.