Random update

Last week I received an email from Dawn's son Andy. You might remember this post regarding Dawn and her final days of Cancer. http://twogirlsformama.blogspot.com/2009/01/sad-message.html Sadly, she lived only 8 days after her 1/16/09 message. She believed she'd live a month. The memorial will be in Seattle, WA so I won't be going. Andy mentioned in his announcement of his mothers passing that it had been 8 years from the beginning diagnosis to her passing. Thankfully he and his brother were able to spend quality time with their mother in the years knowing about her disease of breast cancer.


On a lighter note, I'm starting a new adventure. I've signed up to work with and for one of my oldest friends, Aaron. He and I have been friends for 25 years. I met him the summer before my high school freshman year. My friend Jenny introduced us while she and I were laying out in Santa Cruz (beach) that summer. He spotted Jenny in the midst of hundreds of bodies. He is the class of 1984 Jenny is the class of 1985 and I'm the class of 1986. As it turns out he's been one of my favorite friends of all time. We lost touch for long periods of time starting in the mid 90's because he moved out of state, but as a larger surprise he came to my 40th surprise party thanks to my childhood friend Jeannie who found him on Classmates, so we've continued to stay in touch. He's been back in our old stomping grounds with his wife and 2 children for about a decade.


He works for a company I plan to go part-time with to earn extra money. I'm excited and apprehensive all at the same time. I'll have to take training classes and tests for licenses. The licenses are for life insurance, mortgages, IRA's, etc. I'll be doing all of this at night after my day job. Todd is more than on board. In his words to Aaron, "I want her to do it." It's a step to learning something new while still having my day job to fall back on.


Today I taught Paula how to do laundry. She learned how to sort the clothes into appropriate color piles. She got to fill and pour the detergent and softener. I am the only one allowed to do bleach in the whites. She transferred the laundry as well. She LOVED IT. She said "some jobs are fun.". lol I got the idea from another board in the comments section where a mom said that for her 4 children, she taught them all at age 5 how to do their own laundry. Heck, why not?!


I also bagged up 3 bundles of clothes from Shawna's closet. I pulled out some Gymboree dresses that I'll sell on eBay. Her closet is so much more manageable now. The girls only wore 10% of what she had. Most of it hand-me-downs from Paula.

I'll leave you with a couple photos. Below is one of our sites (we had two that weekend) at Lake Chabot in Hayward, CA. It's very woodsy and pretty. It's also very close to home so we plan on going back often.

Shawna's kindergarten class had a sight words sing-song where each child was assigned one or two letters. When a word was chosen with that letter the kids formed the word and did a little song for it. Shawna was fine when she was in the back of the kids, but in front for her song she pretty much just mouthed the words. Stage fright you might say. Also, you might notice that her right arm has her sleeve way past the hand. She pulled and sucked on that damn sleeve the entire time. It drove Todd and I crazy.