Crane and Staff

It's been a difficult week, but it's turning around.  Saturday we had the memorial service for Grandma Jeanne.  Evie and her cousins were there and she seemed to handle it fine.  We have been fortunate to have lots of family time with cousins and even extended cousins.  My dad's cousins came to the funeral, including Jimmie and Connie from California, and their grandchild are Evie's age, so Evie, Addie and Will got to run around with their third cousins.   I think is probably a rarity in today's society to even know who your third cousins are, and I mentioned that Mama Krech (my great-great-grandmother) would be thrilled to know that we were following her instructions to Dolores (my grandfather's cousin) to "keep the family together" even into the 21st century.

One of the things we did with our family time was play a game called Codenames.  This was a bit hard for the kids but Tia, genius that she is, found a way to modify it for them.  She lined up all these different word cards and the kid giving the clue was supposed to pick 2 words from the group and give a clue as to which two words they were thinking of by relating them to each other in some way.  Evie's clue was "If you take the "r" out of one of these, it means the same as another one," so from the line up of about 15 cards, she had chosen "crane" and "staff" and come up with that clue to get the guessers to guess those two words.  I was very impressed with that.

Evie missed school on Monday to be home with the family and then went back to school Tuesday.  She enjoyed having that time with her cousins.

Yesterday, my dear friend Annalisa arrived for her annual birthday visit.  She took a Lyft from the airport to our house because I was working and then when I got home, we went to go get Evie and she was so excited to see Annalisa!  Today Evie had a half day at school so we went to pick her up and then go get our nails done, but unfortunately Evie started feeling sick as we were in process and stayed feeling crummy until she put herself to bed at 6 pm.  I'm hoping it's not a resurgence of the flu and doesn't overshadow the rest of Annalisa's trip.