Tag: Lydia

The Lydster, Part 84: Cousins

It’s Lydia’s 7th birthday today.


On her mother’s side, Lydia has three first cousins, 10-year-old twin girls, and a nine-and-half-year-old girl. But on my side, we gave my parents three granddaughters about a dozen years apart.

Rebecca, Leslie’s daughter, is 32 and lives in southern California with her husband Rico; she’s the one wearing the coat in the two pictures below. I can tell you that she has been a great, supportive cousin to Alexandria, Marcia’s daughter, who is 20 and lives with Marcia (and lived with my mother) in southern North Carolina. Likewise, Alex has been a wonderful cousin to Lydia.

But until recently, Rebecca and Lydia had never met, though Lydia had seen Rebecca and Rico on the TV show Wipeout back in September. So when Rebecca arrived in NC for my mother’s funeral, we made sure that the two of them had some quality time together.

Unsurprisingly, Rebecca was also a terrific cousin to Lydia, who was a bit in awe of her big cousin after her impressive, albeit second-place finish, on a very rigorous game show.


In fact, when we drove, in two cars, to Salisbury National Cemetery, some 40 miles each way to bury my mother, Rebecca rode with Carol and me, in the back seat with Lydia; they seemed to be entertaining each other thoroughly. I’m glad they got a chance to meet. I’m only sorry that it took so long, and the circumstances which finally brought them together.
***
Oh, yeah, it’s Lydia’s 7th birthday today. I had a meeting with her teacher earlier this month, and she said that Lydia is a bit of an old soul. The teacher might make what she called an ironic aside, and Lydia, as often as not, would “get” it and laugh when no one in the class did. She’s still rather shy around adults, but she does pay attention to what they say and do.

Lydia is also getting more clever. A couple of days before my birthday, my wife arranged for my OLD friend Uthaclena, his wife and his 16-year-old daughter to come up from the Mid-Hudson Valley as a surprise. Lydia knew about it and was very good about keeping it a secret. On that day, she also assisted me in moving furniture and got me a tweezer and a flashlight so I could remove a couple of slivers from my finger. So she’s also become quite helpful.

I love you, daughter o’ mine.

(First picture C 2011 Uthaclena; other pictures C 2011 Leslie Ellen Green – taken with her cellphone!)

It’s the equinox ASK ROGER ANYTHING

Lydia is very curious about death. Specifically, she was fascinated how my mother’s cremains could fit in such a small container.

It’s finally spring (or autumn) and it’s time for me to relax and you do the heavy lifting. This is the regular segment in which you get to ask Roger (i.e., me) anything you want. Nothing’s off limits.

Now, as I often mention, I AM allowed to perhaps engage in a little bit of clever obfuscation, but I cannot lie outright. If you ask anonymously, the amount of trickery will no doubt increase.

Actually, I already have a question to start. It’s a query that Uthaclena asked last month that I’m too lazy to look up. The upshot was, “How is Lydia coping with her Grandma Green’s death?”

Actually, she’s fine.

A few things are going on:
1) She knew my mother, but not that well. She saw her last year once, the year before once. They talked on the phone rarely. Now, my mother, with my sister and niece, did come up a month after she was born, and my mom and my daughter had been in each other’s presence a few times after that, but the daughter’s not likely to remember most of those.
2) She has had a cavalier, even what others might call an inappropriate casualness, talking about death, e.g., the way she’s spoken about my father and my wife’s brother John being dead (before she was born), which I took as the naivete of a child.
3) She is very curious about death. Specifically, she was fascinated how my mother’s cremains could fit in such a small container. What is the process?

So ask away.

The Lydster, Part 83: The $50 Headache

In retrospect, I developed two theories about what happened to Lydia, which are not mutually exclusive.


Back on January 29, my wife and my daughter went down to Saugerties, about an hour south of Albany, to go to the birthday party of her ten-year-old twin cousins, my brother-in-law’s daughters. Carol and Lydia left late and so got to the party about a half-hour after its 2:30 start time.

On the return trip, Lydia complained of a raging headache, which she described as “sharks sawing into my head” and “like I’m dying”. When she got home, she curled up in my arms, not wanting to eat.

The Urgent Care place, unfortunately, closed at 6 pm, so after consulting with her pediatrician, we took his suggestion and ended up going to the emergency room at Albany Med. I can tell Lydia was not faking when she asked me to sit in the back seat of the car with her, which I’ve only done a handful of times since she was three, usually when she’s been sick or injured.

Of course, since there were people in much more obvious distress at the hospital, we ended being there about 2.5 hours. And as she got to watch the Disney Channel at a point when she should have been in bed, she started feeling better, beginning to get her appetite back. A $50 co-pay later, we went home.

In retrospect, I developed two theories about what happened to Lydia, which are not mutually exclusive. One is that she got stressed out at the party, playing with over a dozen kids she did not know, all of whom are older than she is. The other possibility is that she overheard conversations about my mother’s stroke the day before, and developed sympathetic pains. In any case, it made for a long day, between talking to my sisters on the phone, worrying about our mother, and concerned enough about our daughter that we took her to the ER.

Pictures (c)2009, Alexandria Green-House

The Lydster, Part 82: The Girl Who Mistook A Coat Rack for Her Mother

Lydia tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.


Someone told me, when my daughter was an infant, that she would see me as perfect until she was about 12, then turn on me. That has proven not to be the case. On the contrary, the Daughter is really good at pointing out the errors of both of her parents already, though, like most of us, is less perceptive about her own flaws.

So if I leave something on the floor, or don’t hang up my coat or [horrors] EAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, then I definitely hear about it. Yet she is struck blind by the things on the floor that are hers unless I threaten to vacuum them up.

She laughs when I accidentally misspeak a word, but not so much when I am deliberately trying to be funny.  Meanwhile, I scratch my head at what passes for humor in kindergarten, though she tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.

One day, she was upstairs. I was downstairs vacuuming, but when I had finished, I had not yet put back the coat tree in the corner, so it was in the middle of the living room floor. Her mother and I were talking at the dining room table when Lydia came downstairs. The coat nearest her on the coat tree was her mother’s, so she started talking to her mommy. Then she looked over to the dining room table, saw her mother, looked back at the coat rack, walked into the dining room, and continued telling her (actual) mother her story. No embarrassment, no “oops”; I was impressed, actually, as I would have been mortified at her age.

30 Day Challenge – Day 30: Whomever You Find Most Attractive In This World

Rebecca and Rico were dubbed “Lightning” and “Thunder”, respectively.

Jeez, Louise. I started this thing on May 6. I posted Day 29 on November 14. 30 days? HA!

This picture of my wife and daughter is from April of 2008 in Virginia, probably Jamestown or Norfolk, someplace near Williamsburg.


Oh, my niece Rebecca, who had one of those Kickstarter things to raise the $3000 to put together a music album reached her goal! It was interesting because, with less than a week to go before the Christmas deadline, she seemed stuck at about $2350. Got $1000 in the last week.

And speaking of my niece Rebecca, did I mention that she and her husband Rico both appeared on a peculiar TV competition program called Wipeout back in September? It’s Season 3, Episode 16: Food Fight. Annoyingly, I cannot find it either on the ABC.com site or on Hulu.com, though other episodes can be found there. Oddly, though, there is a transcript of the show.

The hosts try to create artificial tension between Rebecca and another woman over Rico’s affection. Also, Rebecca and Rico were dubbed “Lightning” and “Thunder”, respectively. Though Rico was the third to cross the Shape Shifter (don’t ask), and the first to cross without riding in a shape, he was eliminated in the first round. Rebecca made it to the finals, where she ultimately came in second.

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