A little about me…..

Well, hello there steemit users!

What can I tell you about myself that won’t take many, many days to write or eventually bore you into mouth drooling unconsciousness? I am a woman of another time and another era, where we were allowed to be housewives and mothers to our children without being looked down upon as an underachiever. I grew up the ninth of twelve children, the fifth of six girls in a formerly catholic home. I am originally from Niagara Falls, NY and presently live in the Midwest where the air is much cleaner and the crowds are reasonably smaller. I married when I was twenty-three to a wonderful man named Charles that started out as my best friend and ended up being my soul mate. In August we will be celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary, not too bad for having been told by his father and step-mother that it wouldn’t last six months! They are totally convinced that we stayed together to prove them wrong, Not! Our honeymoon was a hiccup because of an incident at the beach and my fear of bitey things that live in the water!

My husband and I moved to Iowa because this is where my parents moved to back in 1972 because they were tired of city living and my oldest sister was already living here with her husband and three children. I still had family in NY so I kind of bounced back and forth between NY and Iowa before I married. We settled down in a small town with a population of around 20,000 and that is small compared to the nearly 102,000 we left behind in NY. It was the best decision that we made in our new life together, not raising our children in the hustle and bustle of a large city. Though this wasn’t exactly our last move before our permanent home in which we presently reside that has a population of less than 500, where we have been for almost 20 years.

I am the proud mother of 4 children, though we only got to raise 3 of them, we lost our second child when he was 3 months and 17 days old when he died due to a congenital heart defect. His name was Ethan and he was a beautiful baby boy with an old soul because he had this look in his eyes that he knew he wouldn’t be around very long. His heart was backwards and upside down, his birth defect was called dextracardia with corrected transposition of the great vessels; that label is etched on my mind and I will never forget it as long as I live. It was a miracle that he lived as long as he did because his heart was enlarged from working so hard to keep him alive. He died on the operating table because they were unable to get his heart beating again after repairing the holes between the upper and lower chambers. He was the 2nd of 4 children; our first child was a girl (J), then Ethan, then another boy (J) and then finally another girl (C). I left out their names to protect their privacy, besides that they’d be a little testy if I mentioned them. They were born in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1990! I was done after the last one because I only wanted 2 boys and 2 girls, that way they each had a playmate that they could be close to growing up. My husband used to joke that he wanted to outdo my parents by having a baker’s dozen (13), but if there had been a scalpel anywhere near me after the first one was born (after 24 hours of hard labor), she would have been an only child. The last three were C-sections (much easier) and I was up walking around after 3 hours, though it wasn’t totally painless but it was much better when it came to sitting afterwards (anyone familiar with an episiotomy will understand). They were pretty typical children with above average intelligence that spent more time trying not to get caught at doing their atypical mischievous deeds. I thank God every day for these precious blessings that He placed in our lives no matter how many grey hairs they gave to us!

What are some of my interests/hobbies? I have dabbled in too many areas of crafting such as quilting, cross-stitch, knitting/crochet, painting, candle making, card making, refurbishing wood furniture and too many others to list. My very favorite is quilting and cross-stitch, which I have been doing since I was about eighteen. I love reading (mysteries and suspense mostly), baking and cooking in general, canning & preserving foods, camping, gardening, hiking and anything involving the outdoors like metal-detecting. I don’t do as much as I used to since getting hurt on the job but I try to keep my hand in most things. My husband and I like doing woodworking together, like making shelves for my sewing room/library and for the kitchen pantry.

Well, this is just the tippy-top sample of the life of a VintageMama, so I will say goodbye for now and wish you the peace that I have found in the heartland! God Bless one and all!