Thursday, June 26, 2008

Bath Hoodie

My Church has a wonderful program that promotes friendships and care for the needs of sisters called Visiting Teaching. Basically, every woman is assigned a partner with whom she visits four or five sisters each month. In turn, each woman also has two sisters who visit her each month...clear as mud? When B was born, my visiting teacher also happened to be my pediatrician. This sweet woman just loves children and had difficulty carrying pregnancies to term. She and her husband would have liked to have had a very large family, but they were so thankful to have finally gotten the two darling children they finally were able to have. So, on top of being a doctor and mom, she was my visiting teacher. Shortly after B was born, she made me one of these hooded bath towels. It always touched my heart that this woman, who could likely afford anything she wanted to give as a gift, chose to give us the one thing she was short on: Her time. I still have that gift and have used it with all three babies, it's in very rough shape now, but I'll never part with it.

Last night, at the ripe old age of 33, I became a grandmother. The situation is not the happiest, but we have hopes that it will improve. The mother is very young and has a string of psychological challenges. Long story short, it has been best for us to stay in the background as we support our son as he tries to cope with the situation.

At any rate, sad and worried as I am for the situation, I wanted to show our new grand-daughter that we do love her more than she may ever know, and wouldn't you know it, I thought of that gift given by a thoughtful and loving visiting teacher over 9 years ago. So I sat down this morning and made this:

Bathhoodie 012

The only thing I ever disliked about the one that was given to me was that the hood quickly became too small...I blame the kids for that. ;O) So I made this one adjustable. The buttons keep it small for now and when she's bigger, they can simply undo them and the hood will be larger.

Bathhoodie 013

Bathhoodie 014

I think it turned out really cute. I'm so hoping M will be able to bring her for a visit so I can take some newborn shots here in the next couple weeks.

Bathhoodie 015

And by the way, if you are over the age of fifteen hours old, you may not call me Grandma.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulations!!! Grandmother, eh? I won't even touch that one. :)

Seriously, congratulations on a healthy new addition to the family.

BTW... didn't check my VM until tonight. I'll be calling you tomorrow (today??) to squeal with delight!

JD said...

That is awesome!! And such a cute idea!

Kacey said...

Nice work! (You should be proud of how quickly you turn out great stuff) Nice story. Here's hoping that the "kids" get their heads screwed on real straight quickly, now that they are parents. And when they think raising a child is hard, tell them to watch "John and Kate + Eight" on TLC. It's the true life story of a couple who had twins and then sextuplets.... cute, cute, cute!

Gabriela said...

Dang, I so wanted to call you grandma.

That was a sweet post, both about your visiting teacher and your new grand-daughter. I hope things work out.