the weight of happiness

It does not matter how much extra activity this Christmas season entails, daily trips are still made to visit with my mother. Her ability to be understood or to understand what we are saying may depend on any given day, but we have had some very good visits with her.

This afternoon I crawled in the bed beside her.
She said, "I'm happy now."

Sometimes the small things say everything. 

smile

We all get posed, loving on my dear mother on Mother's Day.

But of all the photos we were able to take with mother while she was visiting on Sunday, this was the only one we could get her to smile.  She gets the blankest look on her face as we busily snap pictures. We must keep saying to her,  "Smile, Smile, Keep smiling Grandma."

 I see this same blank look in pictures of her from several years back. That was before we openly talked about her disease, even though we knew it was there lurking...behind that blank look.

The bruised side of her face is from a fall she took over two weeks ago.