Nancy's Notes

When we toured the White House with high school seniors from Lakeside several years ago, it was always fun to see portraits of the various dogs, cats and other animals that have called the White House “home” over the years.

This Sunday is my dad’s 95th birthday, and I must tell you how he continues to amaze and inspire me. Having just moved into an assisted living facility, he is still doing everything for himself except cooking meals.

This is a rerun from an old Sentinel, but even if you remember reading it, I think you’ll still get a kick out of it. Personally, I can handle the “Oil Change Instructions for Women,” except my Jiffy Lube is the Hahns!

In the recent move of my dad into assisted living, the five of us siblings had to determine the next ownership of several family heirlooms that, in some cases, now rest in our 4th-generation hands.

The Art of Crocheting: Just one more thing I want to learn There are so many things I wish I would have learned from my mother before she left this Earth. One of those things is how to crochet.

My brothers and sisters-in-law have spent more time together recently than usual as my dad moved into an assisted-living room at Bethesda, the nursing home in Goessel. He has been living in a duplex apartment, owned by Bethesda, one of multiple duplex units that surround the nursing home campus.

You young’ns missed out on a lot of really cool stuff that was going on mid-20th-century, stuff that went away, never to return (except in museums).

Sometimes I think it is just amazing that my sons turned out to be such wonderful men, loving husbands, and awesome fathers. After all, when they were little boys, long before they started school, I read to them at bedtime or any chance we could get.

“I’ll just give this a lick and a promise,” my mother used to say as she quickly mopped up a spill on the floor. I learned from my mother and her mother that, no, we’re not going to lick the floor.

Every year about this time, a little jingle comes to my mind, but it doesn’t come in completely. I sure wish that when a thought pops into my head and takes up residence there, it would at least be a complete thought, not just the beginning of a thought that I don’t know how to finish.