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Category Archives: Grandparenting

Happy Family Day!

28 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in Grandfostering, Grandparenting, Gratefulness journal

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Two days ago marked the first anniversary of my granddaughter officially joining our family.

Of course, my oldest daughter had been caring for her since she was a newborn, but the wheels move the way they move and she was 20 months old when she became a member of the Haas clan in the last way necessary.

In the legal record.

So in celebration I don’t want to write a whole lot, I just want to let you in on the life of my granddaughter, from the beginning to the present.

Enjoy!

p.s. I am frustrated with never remembering how to find and move around pictures! So after 3 hours trying to get them in order, and not being able to find more early pics, I’ve decided to leave them random.

4 days old
With only a couple hours notice, Lexi took in Baby B as a foster.
22 months old with Aunt Martha
Brooklyn enjoys her sleepover with Martha almost every week.
Bee is about 4 months with Giggy (me)
Still one of her favorite things is to climb on my lap and cuddle.
Me with both the girls – Baby A at 21 months and Baby Bee at 18 months.
My heart was bursting with love that day! So blessed to be with them both at Baby A and Big Brother’s adoption party.
Harvest from our garden barrels. Bee is 2 y 6 m. Every week this past summer she enjoyed helping me weed and water our plants, and now she’ll be eating them!
Happy Birthday 2 year old! More toys to play with at Giggy and Papa’s.
Her hair has a lot of curl! Wild hair out of her ‘do at 22 months.
At family camp, 17 months, with Nevin, Martha and Eli.

I hope wherever you are on this day of Thanksgiving that you are able to feel thankful for the love and the people in your life, no matter what circumstances you are in. Over her life we had a lot of uncertain times, but we have been greatly blessed to go through them because they led to her adoption and being a forever part of our family.

God bless you all.

Becky

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Tears in the Night

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in Childhood, Grandparenting, Relationships

≈ 1 Comment

It was 1990 and I was pregnant with my second child. My father-in-law had passed away on March 16 of that year, and we were still grieving and picking up the pieces of keeping the family business going just a year and a half after we had taken it over.

A member of my husband’s graduating class threw an impromptu “reunion picnic” at her parent’s house next door to my mother-in-law. That worked good for me, because being six months pregnant and having a 20-month old to chase around, I was badly in need of a nap by mid-afternoon, and was able to crash in a spare bedroom next door while my husband caught up with his classmates.

But those weren’t the only reasons I was tired.

The night before I couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t my normal “night person” wakefulness, but a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I tried, so I stayed awake. I think I was knitting, of all things to do in a house with no air conditioning in July, and kept at it long into the night.

I just couldn’t seem to settle down. But with the picnic coming up the next day, on July 4, I knew I should get some sleep.

So around 3:30am I turned the light out. And I was overcome with the need to cry.

I didn’t know why. I wasn’t sad about anything. My husband and I weren’t in a fight. I briefly wondered if something was wrong with the baby, but from the kicking and punching that was going on, I felt that wasn’t it.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop the tears. For about an hour.

And then I fell into a deep, hard sleep. But way too soon it was interrupted by the phone ringing.

I just have to mention that this was a new thing for us, the phone ringing. When we built our home during our six-month engagement, we found it would be long distance from all our family, friends, and any kind of business we wanted to deal with. So we didn’t have a phone on principle. For about three years.

But then my father-in-law got a new thing – car phones – and my husband’s uncle rigged up a jack for the house, so we could unplug it from the work truck and bring it in at night, in case of an emergency, when we were expecting our first child. By the time he was born we broke down and had a landline installed, but we hardly ever used it. We still drove up the road to one of our parents’ houses to make calls local from them.

Since we hardly ever used the phone, my first thought was something was wrong when it rang about 6:30 that morning.

It was my mom. And she was crying. “Becky, I have some bad news to tell you. Momma died this morning. Aunt Violet just called to tell me.”

Her mom, my Grandma Belvie, was at that time living in a nursing home, where she could be cared for. The last time I had seen her was earlier that year, when we had been down for my other grandma, Mamaw’s, birthday celebration in the spring.

Grandma Belvie had suffered with pneumonia many times over the years, and it contributed to her declining health, but I remember her staying pretty sharp even in her last years.

She was fiercely independent. She could make due with less. She lived on the principle that she wouldn’t spend money on things she didn’t truly need. Like a phone. She never had one during my childhood. It was only in her last years that an uncle had one put in, so family could check on her. But Grandma didn’t like to use it. My mom inherited those penny-pinching ways, and I came by them honestly as well.

Grandma grew the tallest corn, the biggest tomatoes, the prettiest flowers. She cooked and used everything she grew, and her freezer and cupboards were full of the evidence.

I remember when changes happened in her town, and the city was making everyone on her dead-end street go off their wells and use city water. And charging them. So Grandma unscrewed lots of pipes and caught her brown water from the sinks and washing machine to use for flushing the toilet or watering her gardens.

I loved pitching in and scooping a bucketful out of our used bath water in the tub to force flush the toilet. I felt just like the pioneer woman I always saw in my Grandma Belvie.

So that early morning on the 4th of July, I wasn’t really surprised. I had known something was up all night, especially that hour of crying that I couldn’t explain.

But just to confirm, I asked my mom, “Do you know what time Grandma died?”

“They said someone had checked her at 3:30 and she was breathing, but when they came in at 4:30 she had passed. So somewhere in there.”

And I told her how I was crying in that exact time.

I don’t know why God allows us to feel things we don’t understand. In this case at least I got an explanation, but what about all the times when we don’t? When we go through hard things that make no sense, when we can’t imagine the reason for our discontent, when just plain bad things happen to us.

But we don’t have the full picture.

On that deep night of sorrow, I knew I was crying for someone else. I just didn’t know who.

And over 600 miles away my sweet grandma lay alone, like she had been for almost my whole life, yet not.

In my heart I hope that while God was letting me feel sadness and loss that I couldn’t understand, he was letting her feel that she was loved, even though her family wasn’t by her side.

Because for God, the distance between us doesn’t limit his ability to draw us close to each other. Close to himself. Even when we don’t understand it.

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Spike’s Legacy

27 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in Death of a parent, Grandparenting, Parenting, Relationships

≈ 1 Comment

This June my father-in-law would have turned 96.

One of the worst parts of not having him around any more is that my kids never got to really know him. My oldest son was not quite a year and a half when Spike died. I was pregnant with my older daughter when he got what he thought was the flu, and days later died from a massive bacterial infection and heart failure.

So for all their lives my kids have heard about Grandpa Spike. They see pictures of him, hear stories, see his name on Dad’s work truck, as Spike named his business after himself, and it has been our livelihood and his legacy.

I knew my father-in-law, beyond just a name or to recognize his face, longer than I’ve known my husband. Which was a good thing, because he could be very intimidating.

He was a big man, a presence you had to notice. He could also be loud, startling even, when he wanted to make sure you knew he was there.

But for all his blustering, he often was content to just sit and not say much.

I knew him initially as a customer in the restaurant where I had my first “real” job. I had become a waitress and worked some weekend mornings when Spike and his wife would come in for breakfast. I recall the other waitresses would grumble, “there’s that grouch again”, and I would look at it as a challenge.

“He’s just a teddy bear,” I’d say, and march off to serve him his coffee with a handful of creamers (he preferred it black), just to make him yell. But it would soon turn into a chuckle when he realized I was egging him on to get a reaction from him.

It didn’t take long for him to become one of my regulars, and I liked it that way. I wasn’t easily intimidated, and he wasn’t easily won over, so it was a challenge for us both.

So fast-forward about seven years to the second date I went on with my not-yet-husband. After dessert we went to his parent’s house where he lived so that I could balance his checkbook and roll his change, things I loved to do and he never did. And meet his parents.

He warned me that his dad might be a little scary at first, but I assured him I wasn’t worried. I knew what I was in for.

I don’t know if he remembered me from the restaurant, but I had no trouble getting reacquainted with my future father-in-law. We went for cheap dates, so I spent lots of time in their living room. And once we were engaged we were down the road where our house was being built every spare minute, so we often dropped in to eat dinner with them.

Even after we were married and moved into our house, we didn’t have a phone for a few years, so I made a habit of stopping by their house most afternoons to make calls and chat with them. And see if they’d invite us to dinner.

Then when our first son came along, we broke down and got a phone, but the habit of stopping in almost daily stayed with me. Especially since the summer I was pregnant it broke records for the most days over 90 degrees, and I’d sit in front of a fan until I couldn’t stand it, then drive three miles to sit in delicious, cold air.

And since my mother-in-law was not a big talker, and my new husband took after his mom, Spike and I carried the conversations. I loved his stories and jokes and pronouncements on the latest happenings in our world.

One of my absolutely proudest moments came when he showed me how much attention he’d been paying to the things that were important to me. We were out to dinner with them, and walking through the restaurant I was behind him carrying our one-year old son. Spike pointed at the baby and told everyone along the way, “Look at this kid. Look how healthy he is. He hasn’t had a drop of anything but mother’s milk his whole life. Not a drop of water, no juice, no cow’s milk, just mother’s milk. Isn’t that something?”

I never asked him why he was so impressed by this, but he was, and it was the most empowering thing I think anyone had ever said about me to my face.

He’ll never know how, when our second child was born a few months after he died, and I would breastfeed her, I would picture him standing over me, bragging about how healthy she was, and by association what a good mom I was.

It was the same for our other children as they came along, for all the years I nursed them I had Spike’s voice in my head cheering me on.

Some of my children look like him in ways. Others have some of his personality traits. Or maybe I just like to imagine they do, because I got such a kick out of knowing him that I want them to be a little like their ornery grandpa.

And when they did seem to act like him, I’d just say what he always said to his grandkids, “Go outside and get the stink blown off you!”

Spike was a hard worker, proud of a job well done, but also a man who liked to kick back in his recliner and chuckle over a corny joke, especially if he could goad you into laughing with him.

So when my kids are horsing around or lazing after a long day, I like to think that Spike would have loved to sit with them, maybe holler to get their attention, have them pull his finger, or just lean back and smile at the parts of himself he would see in each one.

And that’s the real legacy.

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Over the Moon!

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Becky Taylor Haas in Grandparenting, Gratefulness journal

≈ 2 Comments

Three days ago I formally become a grandmother.

I’m not announcing a birth. Our sweet girl Brooklyn officially joined our family.

Our daughter didn’t get her that day.  In fact Bee, as we call her,  will not remember it as any different in her mind.  Family and friends, outings, and later this week a party to celebrate. All normal events in her life.  She will look at pictures, more than 20 months into her life, and probably not think of them as a big deal.

But we will.

When our daughter first entered this adventure of fostering, and possibly adopting, I had no idea what this would look like, but I was willing to jump in. I always loved having a baby to drink in, pour into, spend hours staring at and cuddling with.  To love.  And as you’ll read in later posts, loving foster babies has its own perils and triumphs.  I poured into our daughter’s first foster baby, and had the gut-wrenching, heart-breaking experience of watching her go to a different family on her journey. (More on that soon.)

With her second foster I was no less willing to love her unconditionally, but with the sobering knowledge of no guarantees for how long.  At four days old she was delivered from the hospital to my daughter’s home. I got there about an hour later to stay with her while my daughter worked, and from that first day I have not held back from this beautiful little person.

Now it’s official.  As of November 26, 2018, Miss Brooklyn Jayne Haas is my first forever granddaughter!  “Blessed be the Lord – day after day he carries us along.  He’s our Savior, our God, oh yes!” (Psalm 68:19 MSG)  Without God’s strength none of us could have stood under some of the pressures that have come over the past two years, but his mighty hand has held us firm as we pour out love to this child.  His child.  And now ours.

9.  Brooklyn Jayne

Of the things I’ve numbered so far for which I am grateful, this little girl is high up on the list.  In fact, we are over the moon with joy that everything is final and forever.

This relief is still new.  Monday in the courtroom I listened to the judge converse with our daughter, going over  legal proclamations,  details she would need to follow up on in order to seal up our granddaughter’s past identity and begin her new life. With her new  name and status as our daughter’s daughter.  Real.

I can now exhale.  I have always thought of her as our own, and now she is forever safe in our family.

Even though I knew her middle name was changing to mine (the way it should have been spelled, with a “y”), tears  sprang to my eyes when it was proclaimed out loud by the judge.  A part of me will always be a part of her.  And I get to tell her the story of the spelling difference, our family legacy, hers and mine.

The older she gets, the more Bee will realize she has her own genetic heritage,  while solidly part of our family.  I have a lot to learn  about how to recognize and celebrate the things that make her distinct from us.  I will fumble, be oblivious to what she is looking for at times, but I am trusting God to prompt me to help this child be who he knows she can be.

I’m not one to ask God for signs, but  when I think about a moody future teenager sassing me because my skin color is not like hers so how can I understand her, I wonder if I will have the resources to love and guide her through those trials.

Walking into the courthouse Monday, the sidewalks were generously splattered with puddles.  Close to the door  was a particularly big one, and I was contemplating a running leap when I saw something floating  on top of the water.  As I leaned down I recognized it as money.  I picked it up, looked to see if someone was close by who could have dropped it but there was no one.  So I stuck the barely wet bills in my pocket and jumped the puddle.

As I reflected on it later, I saw that God was giving me a reminder that no matter what the obstacles I think I have in front of me, he will provide.  In this case it was $6, and I don’t know that there’s any great significance to the amount.  Maybe it will be the start of a savings account for Brooklyn.  Maybe there’s another use for it.  It may seem like a small amount, but as Zechariah 4:10 says:

10 Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin, to see the plumb line in Zerubbabel’s hand.”

This was a day of small beginnings, and though the work has been going on for more than 20 months of her life, God rejoices with us to see this family have its official beginning day.  And the plumb line is the vertical version of a level, the line that makes sure a building stands straight and sturdy and strong.

And that’s what I get to help do for Brooklyn.

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  • Minding My Own Business
  • In My Humble Opinion
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Minding My Own Business

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