Elizabeth, Dorothy and I went to the funeral for Elizabeth's grandma, Dorothy Meamber, this past Wednesday. We flew down to Medford, OR early Wednesday morning and then drove to Yreka, CA for the service.
A few days earlier, while planning the service, Elizabeth's aunt commented to her mom about Dorothy, their mom, that "one thing you can say about her, she was determined." Caroline burst out laughing, because Elizabeth and I have often said that the "D" in our Dorothy's name stands for determination. And my parents confirm that my grandma Dorothy Nugent was also a very determined lady. So it seems that baby Dorothy has inherited more than just a name. At the reception after the funeral, we all got to see this trait. Dorothy was having fun playing with her cousins (aged 5 and 9), and at one point found some stairs going up. She tried crawling up them, which was fine since we were watching. But when we tried to take her away from the stairs, she headed back towards them. When we took her to the opposite side of the room and tried distracting her with toys and her cousins, she still headed back towards those stairs. She wanted to go up them, and nothing was going to stop her!
During the church service, I was tasked with keeping baby Dorothy quiet, and she was a champ. I had to be a bit nimble, since she wanted to explore the pews to see the people and grab the pencils, but we managed to stay about as unobtrusive as a 15-month old baby can get. As mentioned above, she had lots of fun playing with her cousins at the reception afterwards.
Dorothy's sleep schedule got thrown off, because we woke her up early Wednesday to catch our flight out of Seattle, and she napped at various times when we were driving around. We stayed at a hotel back in Medford on Wednesday evening, and Dorothy didn't want to go to sleep, since she'd slept on the way to the hotel. She eventually did sleep, but then woke up three hours later. I'd had a cough that made sleeping difficult for a few days, so I got up and played with her for a couple of hours. Eventually we all fell asleep again, but only for an hour, since we had to get up at 4am to catch our 6am flight back to Seattle.
Oh, and to anyone who was in the security line at the Medford airport and were horrified at the couple who were feeding breakfast food from McDonalds to their baby: you try and find anything open at 5am!
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 5, 2005 01:24 PM