Nana's 90th

Today is my Nana's 90th birthday. I can't believe she's 90 (they grow up so fast). I can't believe that at 90 years old she still keeps house better than me and has more energy than me. I am so thankful for her. She deserves the best birthday gift that money can buy, but instead we did our best to throw her a sweet, simple little party.


She didn't want a party. She didn't want me to make a fuss over her, she didn't want people to feel obligated to come to a party for her with all the other stuff they probably had going on.



She told me if I threw her one, I'd be in trouble.



But I finally convinced her that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I did nothing, and couldn't we just have a few family and close friends over? She agreed.




So I set to planning. But for those of you who don't know, I've had a weird couple of months since October, which made focusing on this party and planning it kind of challenging. Yet, it was really important to me so I was determined.



I wanted to have party favors to hand out, so I got some fancy little frames and put a picture of my grandma in her youth:










And then tried to wrap them up prettily. I don't know why, but I like the look of plain packages, tied with string. I added doilies and a paper rose in an attempt to make it look kind of vintage:








We played "Dee Bingo", which was my version of Bingo but with facts/info about my Grandma and the year/times in which she was born. I used paper butterflies for the space markers:







She received some lovely gifts and sweet cards which she was surprised and delighted by:








My girls all wrote her a little note and read it aloud (Mariah got the jitters so I read hers for her):








We handed out the party favors and everyone seemed to really like them...even the younger guests (which I thought was so sweet):






Nana took time to visit with each of her guests, and she was just so happy that people came to celebrate her. She and Jesse's grandma have a special friendship which is so sweet it makes me teary:








And our gift to Nana (besides a pretty mini rose plant) was a video. We love making those. :)

This one though is counting as my "christmas miracle" of 2010. This is why:

As I said, I began working on it back in October, those "weird" months I mentioned previously, during which it was hard for me to even function. I snuck over to my Grandma's and pulled out all her old photo albums and took pictures of each of her old photos. That way I had them all available digitally so that not only could I use them for this birthday project, but they're now all safely on our computer, backed up in cyberspace so that even if all of Lemon Grove goes up in flames for some reason, those pictures are safe and sound.

About a month before the party, I started putting our video together. I adjusted each and every picture in Photoshop. Some of them I just had to crop or resize, some had rips or tears or discoloration so I had to do more work to fix them. I picked the songs, I organized all the photos, and by December 6th, I had it all ready to be burnt to a dvd. Then a funny thing happened.

Our computer froze, shut itself down, and wouldn't turn back on. When I tried to turn it on, all I got was a blue screen telling me it was "dumping physical memory". Which is greek to me, but did not sound good at all.

So Jesse decided the best (and probably only) option was to wipe out the entire computer, and re-install all of our programs. That alone took 48 hours. The photos were all safe, because we had them on an external hard drive. But all the work I did in fixing/cropping them had to be re-done. And then the video, which had been finished, had to be completely re-done. I was heartsick and panicked and stressed. That video was not only a big part of the party, but it was our GIFT to my grandma. Plus I worked really hard on it. I had a huge ache in my chest the whole week until the video was re-created and burnt to a disc so I knew it was safe and our computer couldn't destroy it again.

I spent 6 hours on Tuesday night re-doing everything. Come Wednesday morning, it was done and burnt and the ache in my chest was gone. I even had time to watch it on our tv and decide to make a few more changes which we did on Thursday and burnt it again and had it in time for the party.

So this is our tribute to my sweet amazing Nana (and my 2010 Christmas Miracle):