1 year

We lost one of the most important people in our lives 1 year ago today....

and I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures...but I wish I took more.

Today I'm having a happy day full of great memories (as opposed to a sad day cause we AREN'T doing that today....)

Some of my favorites:

I'm so happy she got to meet 2 of my kids, and I had years of staying at home which meant weekly visits with her to sing-alongs, bingo, and horse racing.  I'm happy that I worked for 6 years at a school just a mile from her house so I got to pop in and have dinner with her, usuallly Subway where hse always got my order right...and stay over if the weather was bad, even if it meant sharing a bed! :)  I'm happy that I have great memories like her calling Abigail "Abbi" even though no one else does, and her teaching Abigail and then Caitlin to walk with her walker, and Halloween visits, and watching Golden Girls with her, and picking her up from the airport after her Vegas trip, and her calling when she won big at the casino, and trips to the fruit market where she was so excited about the good deals on fruit (I get that from her), and the way she laughed at my kids and made "bug eyes" with them, and how she picked out the BEST outfits for us for Xmas because she always bought the WHOLE outfit in the front window of Limited, and her chicken dumplings, and her drawers of jewelry and her classic Barbies I used to play with, and how she set up a grocery store in her basement of her house for us to play with, and how she loved her job as the greeter at the senior citizen place she ate lunch (where she always told us she got a meat, a potato, a vegetable, a fruit, coffee, juice and dessert for like $2.25), and her trips to the corner restaurant where she'd say "that's too much" and have them bag up half her dinner before she even ate,  unless it was strawberry waffles...cause she'd got to town on those....and our trips to Arby where she always had coffee with her roast beef even though I thought it was weird, and our trips to the HIP to go Xmas shopping, and how she made the best scrambled eggs which I try but can never recreate...

I could really go on, but today I'm celebrating all the great memories!!!!! So I'm making what is sort of sad day into a happy day!!!!  I'm happy she had 97 great years, and I got 33 of them with her!  That's pretty lucky!!!!!  Love ya, Grandma!  Miss you!