Grandma Alta

My grandma is awesome. She will be 90 years old in March, and she is still alive and kickin' it. She flew down here from Calgary, Alberta and spent 5 days here with us. I just put her on another plane to fly to Kansas City on Saturday to visit my parents and my brother for a few days and then she ends her adventure with my sister in St. Louis, then flies home next Monday. And apparently, she had took a trip to visit a cousin and her youngest sister in Ottawa, Ontario about a month ago. How many 90 year olds do you know that are world travelers???? And she is quite a trooper...I took her on quite a few adventures that required a good amount of walking, and she kept up with us wonderfully. She takes such good care of her health and is very fit and active. Nothing slows this woman down. I told her to get comfortable because it certainly doesn't look like she's going to leave us any time soon.

We had a wonderful visit with her. Adelaide became especially fond of her and even taught Grandma how to do her bedtime routine. Adelaide would not allow me to have anything to do with helping her while Grandma was here. They also spent quite a bit of time reading books together. Alicia also enjoyed spending some one-on-one time with Grandma while Addi and I went to Tristan's soccer game. Daniel served Grandma some butter pecan ice-cream every evening...which Grandma seemed to especially enjoy. 

She got in late Monday night. Adelaide and Alicia came with me to greet her. The kids didn't have school on Tuesday due to election day, so we just spent the day lounging and enjoying each other's company. I ran out for a quick 15 minute trip to the voting poles while Grandma stayed home with the kids. I was surprised that there was absolutely no line (turns out 51% of Tennessee voters did early voting). On Wednesday, Adelaide, Grandma, and I went to go eat Indian food at an Indian restaurant in Nashville for a friend's birthday lunch. Grandma had never had Indian food before and thought it was quite tastey. After that, we drove down to the land so she could see the cabin and shooting structure that my dad built. She thought it was wonderful.

On Thursday afternoon Adelaide, Grandma, and I went to The Hermitage. This was Andrew Jackson's (our 7th president) home. Instead of having tour guides, they give everyone headsets. Along the property are signs with numbers on them. We plugged the number into our headset, and our electronic tour guide would tell us about that particular thing. The only place that we had live tour guides, was inside the mansion (pictured above...this is the backside of the home).

At one point Andrew Jackson's plantation had over 150 slaves working on it. His main crop was cotton. They have small cotton field on the property now for the tourists to get an idea of what it looked like. I had never seen how cotton is grown and thought it was quite interesting. Clumps of white, fluffy cotton grow out of these stick-like plants. Grandma picked a couple of clumps and we put them in a ziplock for her to take home.

On Friday morning, during Tristan's ortho appointment, Adelaide and I took Grandma on a walking tour of Vanderbilt Children's Hospital, main hospital, and even the under-grad Vanderbilt campus. We took her to the bookstore where we purchased a lovely gold Vanderbilt University t-shirt for her.

We love you Grandma and are so grateful that you were able to make the long journey to come visit us!