It's the laughter we will remember

I've been busy cleaning out a file cabinet and a desk, both of which have had papers stuffed in them for years with minimal sorting. Three bags of 20 year old tax returns, partial-year report cards and repair records for cars long gone were taken to the dump today. I now have overstuffed neat folders for each of us with papers and memorabilia that I wasn't ready to throw out yet. The kids will each be presented with theirs and they can decide to keep it to show their children or dump it now. (Well, the two that have houses - I'll hold on to the others for a bit)

I saved the notes and pictures to the Easter Bunny and Santa and the homemade birthday cards, or course. It was fun looking through the school reports, with the notes from the teachers about each child.  Not so much fun with some of the later notes, when some started having trouble, or causing trouble. Reading the "Needs Improvement" categories now just screams ADD- why didn't we pick up on it then? (Though I did bring it up, believe me. At the time it seemed if your child didn't have the H for hyperactive, he/she didn't qualify, though both were diagnosed later when they were in their 20s).

The best stuff was the notes and letters we have- a birthday poem for J from Ms M when she was in the Peace Corps, letters from Shoeshine written from his post in Kosovo, and the newsletters my father used to mail out before the transition to the family emails. 

When Ameranth was in elementary school she had to take medicine, which started as a liquid since she had trouble swallowing pills. A few years later the prescription changed and she had to start with the capsules. What drama! I was impatient with her and she was stubborn- not a good combination for success. (Later a new dentist told us that she has "tongue thrust" or infantile swallowing- some kids never grow out of it and she was one- she still needs to wear her retainer to keep her teeth from moving forward) Anyway, Grampa Bob sent a helpful note: