Following Where He Leads...: Nai Nai's Working Vacation

Jason's mom, Linda, (better known around these parts as "NaiNai", which means "paternal grandmother" in Chinese) left to fly home to Colorado a week and a half ago.

I'm still in mourning.

I've never been able to relate when people complain about their mother-in-law. I've always really appreciated Linda. And I happen to love what she did with her first-born!

Linda is great with the children...and very helpful. She just jumps right in, whether it is diaper-changes, feeding, baths, etc. When she sees something/anything that needs to be done, she dives in - including dishes, laundry, etc. That is my kind of house guest!!!

Abigail is Linda's 12th grandchild. The other six live very close to her in Colorado. To mine and Jason's way of thinking, it is way past time for Linda to move HERE, so we can have equal time with her! Those other kids and grandkids have had more than their fair share of granny!

We graciously offered to sell her our house in town (no, grrrrr, we still have not sold it...but more on that soon). But that is several miles away, and we'd really love to have her even closer than that, so we offered that we could get her set up in a precious cottage back in the far corner of the garden. We'll see...I'm not giving up hope!

While Abigail was ostensibly the reason for Linda's visit....we took full advantage of the opportunity to get other much-needed projects worked on.

We ended up painting everything in the house before we moved in last year...except for the family room and hallway. They looked ok (not great, but ok), and we were ready to be IN the house already!

Jas bought five gallons of paint several months ago for us to get that painting done....and it has been sitting there ever since.

But before we could get started painting in the hallway, we needed to address the places where the paint had begun to peel.

And address we did. This is SO WEIRD!

Check out this paint, it doesn't flake off...it peels off in sheets...

....sometimes HUGE sheets.

So when Linda wasn't feeding/cuddling/bathing grandchildren...you could find her working away in the hall.

Linda is a woman on a mission when there is work to be done...so glad she's on our team!

Besides the fact that we always set Linda working while she's here, a couple of other factors may make it hard for us to talk her into moving here.

First, we live in The Deep South. And she was here in August. Put those two things together, and you have heat index well over 100 degrees while she was here. Not exactly what that Colorado lady is used to...and she almost melted.

Second, snakes. We have snakes around our homestead here. Jas spotted one out our family room window (where we all were hanging out at the moment). He went hopping over children and tearing to the back of the house...and came running back out with a gun.

(Don't read this next paragraph if you're the squeamish sort)

The snake was climbing through a bush when he got out there...and he shot it out of the bush. Right in half. And when the front half kept crawling and he poked at it and it bit. at. his. gun. (oh yes it did), he then shot it in the head. That finally did it in.