Strange title, right? Well, it's the first line of a song my grandma sang to me the other day. She was over at our house for her birthday dinner and while we were watching 'Singin in the Rain', someone came to the door for my parents, so it was just me and my grandma in the living room for a while. I've never really talked to my grandma before. I don't know why. I interviewed her once for an AP Psychology project, but I was a stupid high school senior and everything she said went in one ear and out the other. I didn't realize how precious my time with her was. But, the other night, I learned things about my grandmother that I never knew before. We started talking about her father and her siblings and the memories that she has of them, and before I knew it, almost an hour had passed. She had so many sweet stories of sitting around with her father, listening to his "beautiful tenor voice" sing these songs to her. She's getting older and starting to suffer from dementia, but she remembered one of these songs well enough to sing it for me. I didn't know my grandma sang! At all! You could tell that when she was younger, she had a beautiful alto voice. It was so special to hear her sing these things and watch as she remembered the times with her family, especially her father, who died when she was young.
There isn't really a grand ending to this post, I guess. But, I realized that this woman is more interesting than I thought, and maybe I've got more in common with her than I would have imagined. Who knew?
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
There Were Two Little Babies Whose Names I Don't Know...
Posted by Madison at 10:11 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Stupid People
Posted by Madison at 10:54 PM 0 comments
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Reason numero uno I'm not a gymnast
So, I'm doing this show. It's called 'Camp Rock' and it's awesome. I'm a dancer for both camps (come see the show if you want an explanation!) and it's the most dance intensive show I've ever done. It was a rocky start, though. Well, at least for me. I was hanging out with a couple of the guys from the show and Lauren at a gymnastics gym place. Now, let's start by putting out there that I've never been a gymnast. My body is much too long to throw myself around like that and that was when I was a kid. Now that I'm a full grown human and there is much more to throw around there is even less of a chance of being successful. When I got to the gym, first off, the girl at the register asked to see my ID. I'm fully aware of the fact that I look younger than I am (not much, but a little), but this chick was like 17. I didn't have my ID because I didn't want to bring a purse with my wallet and ID and everything into a gym with lots of kids that would like nothing more than to pull everything out of said purse and lose it all. I told the 17 year old on a power trip that I didn't have my ID, but I promise that I'm over 18. She looks at me all skeptical-like and tells me that without an ID, I can't come in. Lauren is nice enough to vouch for me before I tell this girl that I had my ID before she was born (Yes an exaggeration, but I was thoroughly annoyed). So, she lets me in, out of the goodness of her giant heart, and I enter my own personal version of hell.
Don't get me wrong. I love kids. They are so cute and so much fun. But when they throw themselves at you, it hurts. Thus, my hell: Children throwing themselves everywhere, off of stuff, over stuff, into stuff. Thinking that it might be time for me to branch out and try something new, I follow when every one heads over to a rock wall. I can do rock walls. That is one place where long legs and arms come in very handy. However, to get to this rock wall, you run down a long ramp, jump into a foam pit and have to work your way over to it. I ran, I jumped, I landed in the foam pit, I rejoiced in my little adventure. Then, I blacked out a little bit. Yup, one of the small children throwing themselves around had jumped off of the ramp and landed on my head. When the room stopped spinning, I realized which one of the children had landed on me. I'm pretty sure he was the offspring of the Hulk. Probably 12 years old. LOTS of kid to land on my little head. I shook it off, well, didn't actually shake because that would have hurt my head, and continued my adventure. I climbed the rock wall, fell off the rock wall into the foam pit, learned how to do a flip into a different foam pit and suddenly felt invincible.
Then, I decided to take it on. There was this amazing platform that you could jump off of onto a super powered trampoline where you were supposed to propel yourself onto another trampoline and then throw yourself onto a pile of mats. Sounds pretty epic, right? The platform is about 12-15 feet high, but realizing "Hey, I'm 23 years old. Let's not get crazy", I slide down so I'm only about 8-10 feet off the ground and jump onto the trampoline of doom. I was suddenly way higher in the air than I was expecting to be and terrified for my life.
Realizing a split second too late that I needed to propel myself onto the next trampoline, I tried. I really did. But, alas, it was too late and I fell short of the trampoline. I experienced every parents nightmare when their child jumps on the trampoline. I landed on the bar. Let's talk about a sudden stop. My right ankle was throbbing and I couldn't feel my foot. Refusing to look like an idiot (because I didn't already....), I said I wasn't hurt and stood up. When I stood up, the bones above my ankle went one way and my foot went the other. I know I didn't get an 8 year degree in medicine, but I was pretty sure that wasn't supposed to happen. I walked, kinda, over to a chair and tried to figure out what had just happened. I could walk on it, so I didn't think it was broken, but I've never broken a bone before, so there was a sliver of doubt. I stopped jumping around and accepted that I was probably hurt.
After leaving, it was time to go finish moving all of my stuff from Pleasant Grove to my storage unit and Provo. It was about 2 hours before I realized that something was seriously wrong. I could barely put weight on it, my entire leg was weak, and I don't remember ever being in so much pain. I looked at it for the first time since it happened and my ankle was, no exaggeration, about the size of a baseball. By the end of the day, my ankle looked like it had been shot up with Polyjuice Potion and was about 18 different shades of purple. I took the next day off of work and went to see the doctor. Well, the gastroenterologist I worked for until the middle of May. He looked at it and told me that it was a severe sprain with capillary rupture. He put me on crutches and told me to stay off of it for as long as I could. Which, as a dancer in a show that only rehearses for 6 weeks, was about 4 days. For the rest of the week, I worked and rehearsed on crutches. When I wasn't on crutches, I crawled. Talk about pathetic.
So, after 3 weeks of crutches, crawling, limping, hopping, 3200 mgs of ibuprofen a day, 3 ace bandages and 2 ankles braces, I think *knock on wood* it's almost healed. I actually wore high heels to church today :) Now, I just have to be as careful as I can for the next 2 weeks so it doesn't get in the way of this awesome show that I can't wait for!!!
Moral of the story: Trampolines = Bouncing death traps. The end.
Posted by Madison at 6:36 PM 0 comments