Reliving Years Past

LC spent yesterday afternoon and all morning this morning trying to get a lawnmower to work that was given to our elderly neighbor.

One of those "if you can get it to work you can have it" sort of deals that sometimes turns out to not be such a great deal after all.

The past day has been spent with both of them trying to jury-rig broken pieces so that the lady did not have to spend a lot of money to fix a "free" lawnmower. 

There are very few places in Cody that work on used lawnmowers and the two  LC took it to for parts just laughed and replied "don't bother".

It remains to be seen just how successful all this work and effort will be but at least LC tried and that is all anyone can ask..........

For the first couple of hours this morning these two were working on the lawnmower while I spent some time going through old photographs that have been stuck in a box underneath the bed ever since we moved in because we have no place to really put them in this small house.

Digging out each picture, looking at it, studying it, remembering the time when it was taken, has been an interesting experience in reliving years past.

I carefully went through each photo - there must have been 40 in all - and began to more carefully re-wrap them and more carefully repack them in the box before taking them out to a storage shed in back of the house.

Kicking myself that I did not think of it before, and realizing that I only had a few pictures still unpacked, I finally dug out my camera and.........well.........took pictures of remaining pictures.

These first three are of me as a small child with my parents in England.

I do not remember these pictures being taken but I look to be about three.

My father and I were both Norwegian and my mother was English.

My mother was four years older than my father, so in these pictures he would be about 23 and my mother 27.

If I was three in this picture that means that I already had two younger siblings - two brothers.

One more brother and two sisters were born over the next three years (six children in six years).

Another brother was born after we moved to Australia in 1969 for a total of seven children.. 

He was born in 1970 and was nick-named Boo-Boo for the longest time which is telling (although I didn't get it at the time).....................

A picture of my youngest son taken in Canada when he was about four years old.

He was always very big for his age and even though he was two years younger than his older brother everyone thought that they were twins.

A goofy, sweet, animal loving, life loving small child who saw wonder in everything and who laughed so freely he would jump up and down in place when he was happy. 

I worried so much while pregnant with him that I wouldn't be able to love him.

I loved his brother so completely that I was afraid there would be nothing left for this newest child.

It sounds unbelievable to say that now. 

Through my two beautiful and sweet young sons I learned about the capacity of a mother to love...............

My oldest boy on the middle school football team.

Because of his birth date (December 30) throughout his entire academic career (at least until the end of his first year of college) he was always the youngest kid in his class.

Academically that was never a problem but it did become a problem when he decided that he wanted to play football.

By the time he hit Grade 8 all of his fellow team-mates were beginning to hit puberty, as were the members of other teams he played.

The kids were all taller and heavier and were developing muscle mass that my son was not yet developing.

Which meant he got beat up.  A lot.

Sometime in Grade 9 he quit the team. 

If he had stuck it out for one more year he would have found himself physically caught up with his other team-mates, but truthfully I was happy to not see my first born child get beat up anymore.

He now works extensively with high school football teams (as well as high school track and basketball teams) as an Athletic Trainer.............

My youngest on day furlough after graduating from Basic Training in San Antonio.

I hadn't seen him in a couple of months and right after the graduation ceremony first thing in the morning parents were permitted to walk onto the field and greet their sons and daughters.

I waded through the hundreds of people and hundreds of graduates very much wanting to see and hold my son.

When I finally found him I walked up to him and stood directly in front of him, and for a few seconds we both just looked and smiled at each other and neither one of us spoke.

A few months before I had stood and cried alone in a shopping mall parking lot in our home town as he drove away in a van that was making a run through multiple small towns to pick up new recruits.

For a couple of months I received multiple letters from him pleading with me to write to him and to help him remember that basic was just a game (I did).  Letters apologizing to me for the way he had acted over the years (it was OK).  Letters telling me that he had been a bum for a few years and that it was really important to him that he make it through basic (I know and I know and you can do this).

When I first stood in front of him on that field my first thought was "my God - he's grown another two inches". 

He looked huge.

He hadn't.  He had just stopped slouching.

And then I moved towards him, he bent down, and we hugged each other....................