Saturday Night: After Emma and I returned home from the wedding, Jesse and Kaity came over. There was a special "mission" behind this: Empty Jesse's car of the bins and boxes that had been set aside by Adam, Nick and Sabrina from their dad's house--they were kind enough not to just pitch all of this miscellaneous paperwork, photographs, school papers, art work, etc. of the boys. I had kept a bunch of stuff for Jesse, Shane and Dylan from their early elementary years stored in the crawl space over on Belrick.
It took a few hours (!!), but Jesse and I went through it one bin at a time. The memories! The laughter! So, SO precious. I can't even put words to how special this time was with Jesse. I love him so much.
One of the coolest things we discovered was newspapers (The Grand Rapids Press, The Chicago Tribune, and a few others) from the birthdates of Jesse and of Shane. There wasn't a similar "find" for Dylan--but sadly, perhaps Jim and I didn't set those newspapers aside from his birthdate. Anyway, Jesse grabbed his right up (they were preserved nicely in clear plastic bags) and put them in another bin we has designated for his stuff. I think we spent three or four hours reading little stories the boys had written for school, looking at old photos, checking out children's books that had been put aside, etc.
We found probably two dozen of Shane's books: Tolkien, King, Dostoevsky and put those in a crate for him. I brought those over to Dylan a few days ago to give to Shane.
There were lots of things we decided NOT to keep--things that were not at all sentimental went into a separate pile to either give or throw away. We actually finished emptying Jesse's car and categorizing all of the piles in my front room. I should have taken a picture of it, but I did not! Rats. That's okay. I will remember these hours of sweet connection with Jesse, hopefully for a very long time.
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