Mentholatum

I saw something on Facebook that read something like:

Tell me what your grandmother smelled like.

My Grandma Connie smelled like mentholatum.

I was born in California and did not move away until I was almost 4. We lived close to my Grandma and she and I were pretty close. When we moved away, I eventually became penpals with her. My brother and sister always felt I was the favorite of Grandma Connie (and can you blame her?) and always thought my letter writing/fan mail to Gma was a bit over the top. A bit brown-nosey-ish, if you will.

One year, she asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said:

“A framed picture of you,” which gave my siblings more evidence for my “brown-nosing.”

Whenever I missed her, I would go to our medicine cabinet, open it up, and smell the mentholatum. Still absolutely love mentholatum to this day.

Check out this retro pic of Grandma Connie with one of her gal pals-

She is on the right. What a fun picture.

We went to the river this weekend, and it was beautiful.

The three dogs really love it when anyone throws a ball for them. And they all must fight over one ball, they will hear none of this “ball for everyone” business.

Norman the dog is now very interested in jumping as high as he can, yet he always jumps too soon and cannot ever win the coveted ball. If you look closely, HD hasn’t even thrown the ball yet. My nephew is with him.

Before we came to camp, it was pig butchering day. Have I ever told you how much I hate butchering days?

Nephew had asked David to bring him the foot of one pig, and David obliged.

Nephew tried to give it back to us.

Us: No way! You asked for it!

Nephew: I didn’t know it would be this disgusting!

We need a better plan for all butchering days. The problem is completely centered around three major issues:

Dogs
Blood
Guts

Remember Norman from the last butchering day?

So yesterday, we kept the dogs in for as long as we could and HD tried his best to get all the mess cleaned up. But the dogs still found some “leftovers” and then Charlie came in the house and threw up pig blood and guts.

And it looked exactly what you might think vomited pig blood and guts might look like.

Hadley cleaned it up, but didn’t put forth all of her heart into the task and when someone walked by, they knocked the empty box over that housed the blood/gut vomit and it spilled again on the carpet and I had to clean it again.

And so I asked David for a cup of coffee this morning and he was like, “I don’t know.”

And I was like, “Yes, you should, because I cleaned up vomit with guts and blood.”

And so he got me coffee.

Tomorrow is our official “Back to Work” day, but the students won’t come for another week.

I believe I am teaching a K/1 combination classroom.

Yes. I do believe so.