And The Blessings Continue….

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter; I am still smiling over our day with family. With grandkids at various colleges & jobs now scattered around the country it was wonderful to have them all be able to be here, along with their parents. We had a full count of 15 for dinner.

My dining room table is not big enough to hold everyone, so, as has been the ritual since they were old enough to set in a chair by themselves, the grandkids have been put at the kitchen table with all the adults around the larger table in the dining room. The family joke is that they can’t move to the dining room table until we all start dying off! After a hilarious family discussion a few years ago, they decided they were better off this way because they needed granny to do the cooking and as it turned out, each grandparent & parent were needed to fulfill their particular talents when it came to large family gatherings…. Finally, the grandkids have all agreed that they will stay at the kitchen table as long as it takes…. The final concession among the 5 of them is that when they all can get good paying jobs, and the need arises due to their own husbands, wives and children, they will just invest in a larger kitchen table for granny and leave us old people in the dining room… J

We attended sunrise service yesterday morning, as I knew I would need to be at home preparing dinner about the same time our regular service was going on. So, we’re up at 4:30 a.m. in time to have a cup of coffee and get ourselves ready to be at one of our Church member’s farm, we dressed warmly as the temperature was only 33 degrees when we left the house. Arriving there, they had folding chairs set facing the sun. Taking our seats and covered with blankets, the minister started his sermon just as a strong blast of cold wind came straight out of the east to further add to the chilly temperatures…. Then as quickly as the wind had came, it also left and as the sun peeked through the clouds and the birds begin chirping, a comforting calm surrounded the area and all of us there. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful services I have ever attended.

Back home with dinner well on it’s way to being ready, one by one the grandkids arrived, and two by two the kids & spouses all got here…. The house was filled with everyone greeting each other, hugs all around and everyone talking at once. Later near the end of dinner I excused myself and went into the kitchen to start the coffee and couldn’t help but enjoy the giggles, visiting, and relaxed conversation I heard coming from that table’s occupants… There are now two twenty one year olds, two nineteen year olds, and a sixteen year old. The discussion at the moment amidst roars of laughter on such a wonderful, reverent day was why they call them “deviled eggs”…and that from now on they should be called “Jesused eggs”. Following that declaration, the subject returned to how horrible chemistry is, and how the date went last week. Their conversation closely resembling the conversation at the dining room table, about how expensive college loans are, along with a few empty nest stories.

My mind wandered back as I’ve watched our tables change from when my parents and grandparents were putting on the dinner and I was at the kid table, through the years of my own kids and grandkids growing into their own….from the laughter and tears, food fights, learning which way to pass dishes, using your napkin, to the inevitable “you kids had better settle down in there”, not to mention when the conversations blended at both tables of when do you go back, what time are you leaving, and when will we see you again, we’ve all grown in our own ways.

And on it goes, generation after generation, holidays thru the years, around the world as the tables revolve…