KERRE MCIVOR
WITH MONTHS UNTIL THEY REUNITE, KERRE IS KEEPING BABY BART CLOSE
Back to life, back to reality. After five glorious weeks in London getting to know my new grandson and having the sort of quality time with my daughter that I haven’t been able to enjoy for years, we arrived home on Anzac Day.
It was a glorious autumn day to come home to but I felt very out of sorts, and not just from the travel and the changing time zones. It was the realisation that it was going to be a very long time before I saw baby Bart again
‘ It seemed he was growing and changing after every sleep’
and in the six months till I see him, he will have changed so much. It seemed he was growing and changing after every sleep, so six months will make the world of difference.
He will have also forgotten me but I’m going to see it as an opportunity to fall in love all over again. And how often do you get a chance to do that? I’m also trying to focus on how lucky I was to have spent all that time with my family – many grandparents simply don’t have the opportunity. So I’ll be like Bart and I won’t be a grizzler! Kate is wonderful at sending updates and videos, and he smiled the first time I spoke to him via FaceTime, so hopefully I won’t be a complete stranger in October.
I also have the pleasurable task over the next week or so of downloading the thousands of photos I took of my little London family on my iPhone.
It’s mainly to keep the photos safe and to free up some storage facility on my phone, but I also want to have as many images around me as possible.
I’m not quite sure how best to do that. I’ll put an old-fashioned album together, but I don’t know whether to get hard copies or keep the photos on my computer. Before we did up the house, we had a couple of old tables that were purely for displaying photos. After the renos, the old tables didn’t really suit the place so they were off-loaded and now I only really have a small sideboard that will probably collapse under the weight of the photos I have. I love seeing photos on show in other people’s homes. It gives you such an insight into who they are, and who and what matters to them.
I want to be able to see Bart every day and to that end, I have got him on my phone as a screen saver, but I need more. So it’s whether to buy one of those modern photo frame thingies that flash different images up every few seconds or to go down the classical route and put photos in frames.
Perhaps it’s time to get another sideboard – one with multiple shelves so I can change around the photo display week on week. Or would it be better to invest in the digital photo display?
Actually, it’s probably better to do both, isn’t it? Can you ever have too many photos of your grandchildren in your home?