By mommie2zs in Babs — Oct 25, 2022

Babs' First Visit!

We finally got Mom out here for her first visit to the new house. Rain and cold at the beginning of the visit ensured we’d be incredibly grateful for warmer sunny days as her visit came to a close. She was complimentary of the new house and she really gets the delight of all the front porches spread around the city.

“I’ve got her!” I texted the family from the airport.

Mom slots right in and is ready to listen and hang out when it’s an option, and she’s equally happy settled in doing her own thing if people are working on other projects. It makes for a relaxed and fun visit.

Looking through The Vermont Country Store catalog together.

Buster enjoyed sharing information about some of his favorite games with Grandma and she loved listening to him share it all.

This dog loved having another person here to love on her.

“Helping” with Grandma’s small group meeting.

Grandma, Yessa, and I took a day to have an outing to “Hallmark Town” East Aurora, NY. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and we loved walking around exploring.

We began with a stop at The Bookworm book store. We could have spent a lot more time there, but after each of us had found a few gently-used book treasures, we realized we were hungry and headed over to The Blue Eyed Baker.

We moved on to Beulah’s General Store, which was Yessa’s favorite the last time we visited East Aurora. She picked out an item as a birthday present from Grandma and we enjoyed looking at all the fun products they carry.

From there we moved on to Vidler’s 5 & 10 so Grandma could see its wonder.

We had dinner reservations at 4 which gave us about an hour to find and explore the Fisher Price Toy Store. Fisher Price was founded in 1930 by two men and 1 woman. Guess which of the three have the last names “Fisher” and “Price”?

Despite learning that, the store was a delight to wander through with much reminiscing.

Fisher Price was bought by Mattel, so we had several aisles of Barbies to wander through and discuss. So many new colors and abilities and careers for this busy doll. Yessa even pointed out one with vitiligo, which is great to see.

Yessa had us laughing when she was explaining this Color Reveal Barbie to us.

“I think she’s blue, and then after you get her home you waterboard her and she changes color.”

There was a whole wall of Little People so you could pick out the ones you wanted to play with. In a nod to the upcoming holiday season, there were turkeys and Wise Men in addition to the astronauts and monkeys.

I overheard an interesting conversation between a mom, her two 7 + 9 y.o. sons and a friend the mom had with her.

“Was I on a box, Mom?”

“Yes, you were on a box that went all around on the world. Billy didn’t ever get on a box, but he was in a lot of commercials.”

I finally realized after looking at the Fisher Price website that they use the faces of local kids as models for the toys. Pretty cool perk of living here.

Yessa insisted we purchase an Escape Game for us to play as a family while Grandma was here. I balked at the idea, but now I’m so glad she persisted.

The part that startled and then amused us the most at Fisher Price was in the baby section of the store. Looks like the toys are connecting in unexpected ways. Unexpected to us, anyway.

What if you had a toy box full of these?!

I did love the car parked outside that you could drive your hot wheels around on.

After the toy store we enjoyed driving around and marveling at the fall colors around East Aurora, then we headed to the Griffon Gastropub for dinner.

Sandwiches and Shabu-Shabu made for a delicious meal, but the conversation was really the delightful part.

It was a joy to watch Mom and Yessa share stories and ideas.

Yessa talked about her classes and we took the chance to ask Mom about her nursing career and memories.

I was fascinated to learn that in Mom’s recollection, she didn’t work with her first female doctor until she was working at Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines, which was nearly 20 years into her career. Lutheran was also where she worked with her first male nurse. And Yessa and I enjoyed re-hearing the stories of nurses having to give up their seat if a doctor came into the room and there were no other chairs available when Mom’s career began.

When Mom was in nursing school, skirts and dresses were required attire and you had to show up to the evening meal nicely dressed. I had heard similar stories from old-timers at Purdue, so I think this “set meal time with appropriate attire” was a standard back in those years. We were also interested to hear that because Mom and her classmates took classes at Drake University across town in Des Moines, included in their tuition was the cost of taking taxis back and forth from their classes over at Drake. They would pile 5 young ladies into the taxi and off they’d go.

Her nursing school cost was $1200 for the full three year program, which would have included classes plus room and board. My grandmother cashed out her IPERS (Iowa Public Employee Retirement System) account to pay for Mom to go to school. Then Mom was to help pay for Aunt Sheila’s undergrad with her earnings and Aunt Sheila would help Aunt Cyndy. Mom couldn’t remember if it all played out that way since she had her car accident and then she married Dad, so plans were…altered, but all three of them completed their chosen schooling, so it worked out.