{"id":756,"date":"2014-12-26T06:00:37","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=756"},"modified":"2014-12-25T21:46:38","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T05:46:38","slug":"christmas-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2014\/12\/26\/christmas-break\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Break"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>

Judy, Bill and Bella wish you a Merry Christmas!<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s early morning on Christmas Eve. My daughter had to be at her desk at work by seven this morning, and so, since it\u2019s Christmas (as opposed to Winter) break, my grandson is here with me. He\u2019s doing his thirty minutes of reading. A little later, after breakfast, he\u2019ll be doing some typing practice on the iPad followed by a Grandma-administered spelling lesson. <\/span><\/p>\n

It has recently come to my attention that the schools evidently aren\u2019t teaching regular spelling anymore. When I asked Colt, \u201cYou mean they don\u2019t give you words and have your write them ten times?\u201d he gave me a blank stare. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. Well, it\u2019s happening now!<\/span><\/p>\n

After spelling we\u2019ll do some last minute Christmas shopping and take a trip to the bowling alley before we head for the Christmas Eve service at church. In other words, it\u2019ll be a busy day, but a good day. And it\u2019s reminding me of my mother.<\/p>\n

This is one grandchild. For a few days. My mother pitched in for years, helping look after multiple grandkids after school and during summer vacations during the first onslaught of grandkids\u2014the ones from my older sisters. Then, after a few years\u2019 worth of break, along came a whole new flock of grandkids, a second generation of sorts. During one stressful summer, several of my mothers\u2019 kids limped our way broken-winged back home, bringing our own kids, along with us. Marriages were in trouble; jobs had gone away, and our parents place on Border Road in Bisbee Junction was our chosen port in the storm.<\/p>\n

Two of us, my younger sister and I, purchased mobile homes and parked them on our folks\u2019 \u201cback forty.\u201d (Yes, I have personally lived in a mobile home. \u00a0It was a 14 x 70 and it was the best I could do back then. People who sneer at people living in mobile homes generally are . . . well . . . condescending and rude.) Which reminds me of the professor of anthropology from some university or other in California who wrote to me once several years ago saying that my books give a \u201cgood depiction of the lower middle classes in this country.\u201d I\u2019m guessing he wouldn\u2019t have touched mobile home living with a ten-foot pole.<\/span><\/p>\n

But back to that summer in Bisbee Junction. I was in my thirties. My mother was in her sixties. She cooked breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for a dozen or so people a day. There are photos of her dining room at the time with one end of the table surrounded by four high-chairs. That\u2019s a lot of toddlers! We had help in the form of Dolores Decker, but every afternoon after lunch, my mother and Dolores did a whole production line of baths before nap time. And I\u2019m sure my mother needed those naps more than ANY of the grandkids.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so, as I\u2019m treasuring this quiet morning with Colt, I remembering my mother and thanking her.<\/p>\n

Evie Busk was a treasure, and I miss her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s early morning on Christmas Eve. My daughter had to be at her desk at work by seven this morning, and so, since it\u2019s Christmas (as opposed to Winter) break, my grandson is here with me. He\u2019s doing his thirty minutes of reading. A little later, after breakfast, he\u2019ll be doing some typing practice on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5,150],"tags":[14,102,101,103],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christmas","category-family","category-holidays","tag-evie","tag-grandchildren","tag-mobile-homes","tag-spelling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-cc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}