The Gathering of the Clans! (or clan, whatever).

My matriarchal tribe flocked into town 2 weeks ago from all 2 points of the compass (Ben from the North West, Jennie from the South East). Arianne was already here. They played musical houses while each family tried to find friends, neighbors, and relatives with whom to stay on assorted nights; I live in a small basement flat that holds only 1.5 people. I tried to host one grandchild per night on my couch, with our days spent at movies, games, art projects, or shopping for next birthday or Christmas gifts (so I won’t have to pay postage, and they will get what they really want.)

A few days after arriving, Jennie announced that I would be making Arabella’s 8th birthday dress to be worn to her baptism 3 days later. Of course it had to be an exceedingly exclusive dress: deep strawberry-blush duponi silk with embroidered chiffon overskirt and bolero (Bella’s choice). And, of course, Jennie took it as given that I could make it in no time flat from mere measurements and part of a wrong-size pattern. I asked her if she knew how lucky she was to be able to hand her mother a drawing and know it would turn out the way she wanted in a couple of days. “Of course,” she said breezily, rather than fawning appreciatively at my feet. Actually, she has become quite a seamstress herself for select occasions, but she gives the hard stuff to me.

So I started with a mock-up and 2 fittings, then made the bodice and lined it. There really wasn’t quite enough lace for the bolero, so I had to squeeze it into several too-small pieces, and re-embroider the borders myself. In order not to stretch the fabric, I put scotch tape over the border areas, then machine embroidered over the tape, trimmed the excess fabric, and finally pulled the tape out from under the embroidered scallops. Pretty neat! But what was my HORROR to find I had cut the pattern too small, and the bolero fronts would not meet! It was almost 2 a.m. at that point. I shed a few tears, crashed into bed, and hardly slept. I sobbed my failure to Jennie the next morning before our photographs. (A sure sign of exhaustion.)

“Just make a bow for the center space,” said Jennie. Which I did, and it looked even cuter that way than it would have with only a rhinestone button on the bolero. (If any men are reading this, I’m sure you are either gagging or sleeping at this point.) But here is my very beautiful granddaughter in her Boppie-made dress.

(See, isn’t the bow on the bolero cute?) I was well rewarded when Bella told me breathlessly that it was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen.

That left me almost 2 hours to make my own outfit for the family pictures. The blouse didn’t get hemmed, and the skirt wasn’t even started. So I stood in back where you can’t tell, rather than sit front and center where a proper Matriarch should be ensconced, worshipfully surrounded by her progeny. But the blouse looks nice on me, anyhow.

Here’s my family! I think they’re beautiful! And for darn sure they are smart and funny! (click the pix to enlarge)
And of course, the 3 little girls from each of the three families look adorable in their matching outfits! Three little pistols! (My genome doesn’t do shrinking violets.)

AVERY ADELAIDE & DAPHNE
(But where did my children come up with these names? I must flog my faded memory every time to remember each name, and who it goes with. Whatever happened to Anne, Jane, and Carol?)

(Yes, the portrait is by Becca Nae, who would only let me use this pix free if I included her name. SHE’S FANTASTIC!)

Between grandkid sleepovers, I taught Professional Career Workshops. Although I’ve been released from my mission, I still have to find and train a replacement teacher. Naturally I assume I am more lively, scintillating and entertaining than any other teacher could be, so it’s cringe-ful to see another retiree missionary tremble fearfully through lesson plans I have choreographed like a stand-up comic. But I know I’m fully replaceable. (Thank goodness!)

The following week I went BACK up to Portland (I was there only a month ago) to be fitted with an oral apnea appliance which will not require PolyGrip to glue into my mouth, nor peanut butter to scrub it out in the morning. (Yes, I also use a CPAP) On my way I stayed with a friend whose house was full – no bed for me. So I slept on their recliner. WOOOO! It was the best night’s sleep I’ve enjoyed in some time! Maybe I need to look into alternative sleeping equipment in my bedroom. (My dentist, also suffering apnea, says he and his wife’s bedroom has a bed for playtime, but a Laz-Y-Boy for him to sleep in. Hmmm. Don’t need playtime. The recliner should do it.)

Ben picked me up at the airport and took this pix with my phone. (Balloon chins from shooting too close-up.)
Wife Nicki was out of town whooping it up with her sisters and mom (Birthday) so I got to take care of her kids an extra day. For the “special outing” which Ben always takes me on when I visit, he chose the two largest fabric stores west of the Mississippi! YA-HOO! I’m sure he was bored, but he was certainly game!

(There is a teensy weensy spider climbing up its strand to my webcam in front of my computer screen as I type. The Nerve!)

The Portland technician who makes oral apnea appliances couldn’t figure out what I was requesting. So I went home to Ben’s house with the plaster casts of my teeth, made a fake tongue from red Play-doh, and positioned them all together in the way I want him to construct the gadget, and which I’m sure will work. In order for him to see the construct inside and out, I bought some fake-fingernail acrylic and solvent, and coated the Play-doh tongue with several layers. It hardened instantly, and I was able to extract the clay, leaving a perfect, transparent casing for my tongue. I know this sounds weird. But then, I’m a weird girl. However, I can usually get what I want and it usually works. (I know you are waiting breathlessly for my next blog so you can see a photo of me in my extra-terrestrial apnea appliance.)

Now I’m back home and wading through the messiest house I’ve had all year. Excuse me while I make popcorn and read a good book instead of cleaning up.

"FORTHAJULY!!"

"Forthajuly"- the greatest Wing-Ding of the year! Not as generous as Christmas nor scrumptious as Halloween and Easter, but a day of pure excitement from wakeup to far after dark!

Our little house on Clark Street, a tiny subdivision long since paved over to become the parking lot for Utah Valley Medical Center, backed right up against the Hospital's north lawn. It was a great green field then, studded with apple trees, saved for someday-expansion (and how!) Two long blocks to the east was the dead-end of University Avenue, and the hill of the brand new "upper campus" of BYU. It already boasted the elegant Maeser building for administration, the Grant building for classes and library, and the Brimhall building for the sciences. A small stadium built into the hillside (where the Richard Building now stands) had an actual (!) football field with WHITE LINES PAINTED RIGHT ON THE GRASS!

There, on July 3^rd (barring rain, which we NEVER had, but always searched the skies for with worried faces), gloriously magical floats arrived, lining up in expectation of the "Forthajuly" parade! Daddy never let us go look ahead of time, but Mom busily made us costumes: sometimes cowboy outfits with fringed skirts and shirts, a felt vest with a star, and even cap-guns that would bang most delightfully, creating that unmatched, sulfurous smell of daring, wild-west bravado. (Mike tried his best for years to wish those caps into bullets that would shoot us girls to smithereens.)

Some years we went as Indians, with up-side-down paper grocery sacks fringed at the bottom, and holes in the top and sides for heads and arms - not too comfortable, but soooo exciting to our pre-school imaginations. We even had a strip of grocery bag taped around our foreheads with a stiff chicken feather sticking up for authenticity. We argued over whether real Indians wore their feathers in the front or the back. We had never seen a real Indian. (I believe Grandma had chickens in her back yard in those days). Daddy even made us bows one year, from narrow branches and string. No arrows, though. Who knows what depredations we would have wrought! (Mike-the-menace would have absolutely shot us dead!)

Then, just before ten a.m., we all walked, bounced, skipped and jumped to University Avenue to watch the parade. (We had no car. Occasionally we all loaded onto Daddy’s bike: Dad on the seat, Mom sidesaddle on the horizontal bar, Mike on the handlebars, me on the back fender, and Joan in Mom’s arms. I’m surprised we weren’t all killed! (There’s a photo somewhere. Anybody got it?)

I was enchanted at the gorgeous, colorful confections, like gigantic bridal cakes, that drifted along the parade route with no visible means of propulsion. Pretty ladies in bathing suits or ball gowns stood on top of them and waved at us, smiling, their lipstick bright red! (This was the late 40’s.)　

A clown on a unicycle rode past, occasionally falling down and howling. We laughed until we wet our panties. (I enviously wished I could ride a unicycle like they did.) Sometimes there were clowns on stilts. I was astonished they could balance up that high! How did they do that?

Bands played and marched, coming from BYU, whatever passed as Provo High, and maybe Springville.

(They always stopped playing in front of us for some reason, and started again on the next block.) Our pulses raced! Our feet marched in place! Our eyes sparkled! How I envied the girls in swirly short skirts, kicking their white, tasseled boots sky-high while twirling shining batons on their fingertips, flashing them like light-speed windmills, and tossing them in the air. (I always spent that afternoon hiding in the back yard, trying to twirl a stick between my fingers – with little success. I did once buy a painted wooden baton at Kresses after saving my pennies for weeks, but a genuine, silver one was beyond my wildest dreams! Boots and courage were beyond my wildest dreams in those days, as well.) (Now I’m an exhibitionist show-off!) (CLOTHED, of course! What did you THINK!)

The parade went south on University, turned west on Center, and ended at Pioneeer Park, which was neat, because that park had an irrigation canal running along side, and we all loved to get wet and ruin our crepe-paper decorations and clothing in it.

Usually a carnival had set up in the street beside the park, and we rode the merry-go-round and the little toy cars or boats, feeling so BIG and BRAVE! I was always way too scared for the Ferris wheel! We tried to throw rings around coke bottles in the arcade, and invariably missed (I also practiced that all afternoon with Mom’s vinegar bottle, determined that next year I would WIN! Still can’t.)

We sometimes got cotton candy, which was the supreme treat in the world. And then went home for naps (Mom and Dad’s naps. They were exhausted dragging 3.5 kids around town – Yeah, mom was ALWAYS pregnant.) (For 26 years she was pregnant every other year – I now wonder how she held Dad off through those whole, alternating, non-pregnant years).

Over time it became traditional for Dad to make root beer after the parade by stirring together a bottle of flavoring, sugar, water, and dry ice, all compacted in the pressure cooker for an hour or so. Ahhhhh! Dad’s Root Beer! We could hardly wait until it was ready, and nobody will ever forget it! (In later years, Mom took to making root beer with yeast, and letting it zazzle up a couple of days in the fridge. Definitely a weird flavor, but we would do anything for the magic of carbonation!) (Except BUY it! We could never afford “store-boughten” anything.) (I don’t think I had a bottle of store-bought pop before I was 12!)

At night, and for the only night of the year, we kids were allowed to stay up late and watch the fireworks being shot off from the BYU football field. Everyone on the street was out on their lawns on kitchen chairs, ohing and ahing like the enchanted hicks we were (and still are). I gasped at the glory of stars exploding in space like the beginning of the universe, which then spilled down and landed in the big fields that later became Provo High and a few BYU playing fields. They were all meadows in the 40s and 50s. Each and every year I SAW those stars fall right into the meadows, and swore with all my heart that the next day I would remember to go out into the fields and pick up some of those stars to keep. How I would love owning my own stars! But I always forgot until the next year, when I cursed my bad memory and swore that vow once again.

When the fireworks ended, Mom and Dad insisted we were tired, which was totally, absolutely untrue! We were so stoked we could have galloped up Y Mountain! But we sure fell asleep fast when they forced us, whining and protesting, into bed.

Now the Provo 4^th of July Celebration is billed as the biggest in the nation. People camp-out on the parade route, starting on the afternoon of the 3^rd, to save themselves places for a parade twenty times the size and brilliance of the ones of my youth. Bands and floats come from California, Wyoming, and Texas. The clowns throw baskets of candy at the kids. The Stadium of Fire costs $40 a seat, and big name entertainers come to tell jokes, play music, dance, march, and keep thousands of rich people entertained for the hours before the fireworks.

(The year Ben got home from his mission, I actually bought tickets! The first and last time ever. Bob Hope came and told dirty jokes which received dark mutters from the crowds. But the fireworks were spectacular up close!)

Nevertheless, nothing will ever match those Forthajulys from my childhood!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICKI

That's her, over there on the left with the red arrow above her head! Adorable Nicki Davis, my own, and ONLY, sweetest daughter-in-law. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DARLING GIRL! Gorgeous blue eyes, clear complexion, silky hair, petite and dainty, (I don't think she's 5 ft tall in her bare feet!) full of love, tenderness and devoted mothering.

Yes, that's me beside her, and Ben on the right. Lucky Ben somehow managed to catch her. (It's quite a story, and if you'll go here, you can read about one of the most imaginative marriage proposals you've ever heard!)

Nicki is the most patient, loving, involved, diminutive little wife and mother you could believe. Long after I, (in my earlier motherhood) would be screaming at my kids (WAY too often!), or drop-kicking them out an upstairs window (figuratively), or taking ANY opportunity our wallet would afford to hire a sitter and escape with what little sanity I had left, Nicki will simply take a deep breath, gather her little ones onto her lap, and read them a book. I believe she would rather be with her darlings at home than on a 2 week Vegas vacation without them.

And she knows just how to handle Great Big Ben (6 ft. 2), who actually has to stoop down or plie' to kiss her, and doesn't mind a bit!

And boy, does she make gorgeous kids! (Although I have a notion Ben helps - - especially when I look at young James).

Thanks for being in our family, Precious Nicki!