As the last few days of 2022 get checked off the calendar, it seems fitting to take stock of the year gone by.
It has been a year of many blessings. First and foremost, January brought the birth of my granddaughter Lorelei and that, hands down, is number one on the list. Frankly, I don’t even need anything else on the list; she’s more than enough.
Not only was I able to be in the delivery room for her arrival – a moment I will never forget – but I have also been around her nearly every day since. My daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter literally live down a few streets and around the corner from me. Walking is almost faster to get there, depending on traffic and the back up at the various stop signs along the way.
There have been a couple of occasions when they all went out of town and I had to go for a long weekend or one time, a full week, without seeing my granddaughter in person but thank goodness we could FaceTime. The fact that she is fast approaching her first birthday is mind-boggling. She has grown by leaps and bounds, has lots of teeth, walks when she isn’t running, dances every time she hears music, loves Elmo and has a mind that is always working. You can literally see her figuring things out and she is finding ways to make her wants known. She toddled in to the bathroom the other day, my daughter said, and brought out the cup they use for rinsing her off at bath time. She took it over to my son-in-law and stood there with it, showing it to him as if she was ready for her bath. That’s part of their nighttime routine, though, she was a few hours early. But any excuse for the water; she loves that, too.
Another blessing is that with my laptop, I am pretty portable so when I am called upon for ‘Grammy duty’ in terms of babysitting, I can just take my work with me. Probably not quite as efficient as working in the office but I still manage to get “stuff” done, whether it’s writing stories, posting to our website and/or Facebook, returning phone calls or emails … but there’s nothing quite like having to drop whatever you’re doing to accept a hug from a tiny human.
It also became part of my weekly routine at Escalon football games to share one of the latest photos I took of my granddaughter with my phone (thank goodness I bought more cloud storage!) with a couple of special people – assistant coach ‘Frosty’ Van Houten and senior cheerleader Makayla Wentzell. If I didn’t find them on the sidelines before kickoff to give them their dose of Lorelei for the week, it just didn’t feel right.
It was such a joy to travel back home to upstate New York, in the foothills of the Catskills, in October so Lorelei could meet the family still back there. She definitely charmed them all plus we timed it just right, the fall colors were at their peak and we fit in a few sightseeing day trips as well. We visited the zoo, a couple of museums, took a drive through the Adirondack mountains. No real schedule, no deadlines, just embracing the moment and spending quality time with family and friends. And luckily, flights to and from the east coast were fairly smooth and we didn’t have any delays or cancellations.
As far as the year overall, I really have no complaints, especially since it will go down as the year when I got the best title of all: Grammy.
Marg Jackson is editor of The Oakdale Leader, The Escalon Times and The Riverbank News. She may be reached at mjackson@oakdaleleader.com or by calling 209-847-3021.
