Taking the Scenic Route

Arnold E. Goertz

BUHLER – Arnold E. Goertz, 80, died March 14, 2005, at Hutchinson Hospital, Hutchinson.

He was born June 9, 1924, in Reno County, the son of David P. and Helena C. Ediger Goertz. He attended Bethel College. He was a product designer for Hesston Corp. and also farmed.

He was a member of the Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church, the Mennonite Men’s Choir and the Wheat Heritage Engine Club and was a Sunday school teacher and a deacon.

On November 7, 1948, he married Genevieve Dirks at Buhler. She survives.

Other survivors include: a son, Robert, Buhler; two brothers, Wilbur, Hesston, and Ronald, Montgomery, Ala.; two sisters, Marieanna Siemens, Inman, and Loretta Zehr, Gridley, Ill.; and two grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by a daughter, Doris Goertz; a brother, Harold; and two grandchildren.

Funeral service will be at 10:30 a.m. Friday at Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church, with Pastor Willmar Harder presiding. Burial will be in Hoffnungsau Cemetery. Friends may call from 2 to 8 p.m. Thursday, with family receiving friends from 6 to 8 p.m. at Buhler Mortuary.

Memorials may be given to the Doris Goertz Scholarship fund or Leukemia Society, both in care of Buhler Mortuary.

Genevieve L. Goertz

BUHLER – Genevieve Lorraine Goertz, 80, died March 17, 2005, at Pleasant View Home, Inman.

She was born Sept. 9, 1924, at Hutchinson, the daughter of David T. and Sara Zielke Dirks. She attended Salt City Business College. She lived in Garden City, Newton and Buhler. She worked for Avon Products and Fuller Brush Corp. She also delivered the Hutchinson News for 15 years.

She belonged to Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church and the Happy Hour Sewing Circle.

On Nov. 7, 1948, she married Arnold Goertz at Buhler. He died March 14, 2005.

Survivors include: a son, Robert, Buhler; a brother, Edwin Dirks, Wichita; and two grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by a daughter, Doris Goertz; and two grandchildren.

Funeral service will be at 10:30 a.m. Monday, at Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church with Pastor Willmar Harder presiding. Burial will be in Hoffnungsau Cemetery. Friends may call from 2 to 8 p.m., with family receiving friends from 6 to 8 p.m. Sunday, at Buhler Mortuary.

Memorials may be sent to the Doris Goertz Scholarship Fund, in care of the funeral home.

For those who don’t read the comments, I wanted to post what my mom wrote about Arnie (before hearing about Genny’s passing)

I’m so sorry, Sunshine. You and Arnie (and Genny) had such a special bond. He ALWAYS asked about you guys, and “Little Zach”. He was a good, gentle influence on you, and he loved you dearly.

I sat beside him in church on the last Sunday he was strong enough to come to church service. We hugged deeply, knowing it would probably be the last time.

Arnie and Grandma E were friends in high school. Mom says they had a class together in BHS when mom moved there to live with her aunt. She and Arnie always sat at desks near each other, since they were both ‘outcasts’. Grandma is the one who originally suggested to me that Arnie would be a good mentor for you. She was right.

He was also my bus driver at the first grade school I went to. There was a curve that went around/near a river that we drove on every day. As a first grader, it scared me every day that we might fall in. I jokingly told him that once as an adult. He felt so bad, and wished that I had told him back then. He would have slowed down so I wouldn’t have been afraid. He wasn’t taking it fast to begin with, I’m sure. He just loved kids so much.

I’ll miss him a lot. We hugged every Sunday that we were both in chruch. His ‘too sweet’ smelling aftershave stuck to me every time. I’ll miss that.

While I was driving to work the other day, I was thinking about him. How he had had hip problems pretty much all his life, and has always had a huge limp. How he and Genny adopted a beautiful little girl, only to find out she had a rare disease that ended up eating away skin all over her body, and the bone structure on her face and she had to have a nose put on, which didn’t work. She died young. The adoption agency offered to give them a different baby who was healthy. They refused, saying that God sent them this little girl to love, and beauty is skin deep. They loved her till her early death. His adopted son, who went through a very rebelious time (hes fine now). Genny getting Parkensens disease and he faithfully taking care of her. He had Leukemia. He didn’t deserve ANY of this. I was thinking how now, at long last, He is getting what he deserves!

God-speed, Dear Arnie.

I found this photo of Zane with Arnie & Genny.  It was Zane’s first overnight trip, out to my folks (when we lived 4 hours away).  He was about 6 weeks old in the photo.

Well, just had supper with Mom & Dad.  They came to look at the cars before tomorrow…I wasn’t sure either car was safe to drive to the funeral with and a round trip to pick me up would be a real pain.  It looks like the Pontiac has a gauge problem instead of an oil problem at this point, so that is good.  Not sure why it is leaking so much water, but as long as it doesn’t start clattering or the temp doesn’t start rising it should be OK.

The Olds, on the other hand, has about 4 major problems.   The steering wheel is falling off, it needs new engine mounts ($100), there is a vacuum hose leak, and it runs through tremendous amounts of water (probably a cracked radiator) if it heats up.  The last one is no biggie just to run to the school and back (as long as it sits at the school for a while to cool down in between).  The other problems are more problematic.  Dad is going to look at the book and see if the engine can just be chained down instead of spending $100 on mounts since it is really too old to put any money in at this point.  He is also going to see if the steering wheel can be rigged up….it will lose the capability to adjust where the steering wheel is, but that is a whole lot better than it is now…it feels like it is going to fall off in your lap as you drive…very disconcerting.  I guess I misspoke…there is 1 more problem with the Olds, but it has been there for years and won’t be fixed…the front windshield is cracked, but it is out of Zach’s line of sight.  If I drive it, I either have to duck to see under it, or sit really tall to see over it, so I mostly don’t drive it. lol. 

Now, for the really GOOD news.  I got a box in the mail from FeeBee.  A stack of infant prefolds to stuff my FBs with.  WOO HOO!  I will get a picture tomorrow (my camera prefers daylight) because there are a few cute colored ones.  Zane was in love with the colored ones…he kept stacking and folding them.  I wish I could still put prefolds on him without worrying about injury…he sure looked cute in them and would love some dyed ones.  There was also a SnugToFit in there that looks like it is the toddler size  I liked the regular sized STFs until Zane grew out of them.  I was really wanting to know how those fit since they are a reasonably priced fitted and now I will know how they work! I am so happy!

I think Zane must have had a pretty good growth spurt.  Just a week or two ago I was saying that I might not even need to buy him a new summer wardrobe because it seemed that most of his growing was in his legs.  Today the shirt he had on fit him in his torso well enough that it probably will not make it to even the middle of summer.  His shoulders aren’t filling it out, but he is so long waisted.  It will be a few weeks until I need to think about that though.  I am just glad that this year we should be able to get him something without having to borrow money from my folks.

Arnie’s wife, Genny, died today.  I am not terribly surprised considering the only reason she was probably still alive was because of Arnie’s care, and when he went, I think she just lost the will to stay.  Arnie’s funeral is tomorrow, Genny’s will be next week sometime since she has a lot of family out of town that will have to travel in.  A part of me is releived.  She wasn’t scared of dying, but I think she was scared of living without him

This picture I have of them just makes me bawl right now.  Now he can walk without his limp, and she can talk without crying.

Pffft.  Zane is working on proving that theory.  I can’t really go out today.  (I think I ate something bad…dh had problems in the middle of the night, but his system works a lot faster) and don’t want to be far from the bathroom.  As I was sitting in the living room, I heard ds turn on the sink in the bathroom.   He usually just spends an extrodinary amount of time washing his hands, or playing with a rubber ducky in the sink, getting waterlogged filling and drinking from a cup, things like that.  It can be annoying, but not really harmful.  After a while, I noticed that it just didn’t sound quite right.  Went into the bathroom and was VERY glad we live on the first floor.  He got his hand positioned just right under the running water and shot water over every surface of the bathroom and there were puddles all over the floor.    I got him out of the bathroom, locked the door behind me and stiffled laughter while he threw a tantrum outside the door.  You could hear the sound of water dripping off of things.  I know I should be mad, but dang it struck my funny bone.  It was a little depressing to pull out all my nice clean towels and spread them over every surface to start soaking up the water, and it won’t be a joy to remove them later, but what an astonishing mess.

So, I locked the bathroom door to keep the battle down for the evening at least (and avoid further messes).  The only thing is, the door doesn’t have an actual key…it has one of those holes you poke a very thin screwdriver in and fish around awhile to pop the lock back out.   That is not the most convient situation when you are making unexpected bathroom runs.  hmmmm….now how big are those FuziBunz anyway???

Maybe getting him out of the house really is the key.  Yesterday still had it’s share of meltdowns and tantrums, but it certainly wasn’t the constant thing.  We took him to the playground for an hour or so late afternoon.  He needed his winter coat and hat, but I was determined to get him outside.  It sure was better last night though.

Arnie died about 2 hours ago. 

  AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGG!

I didn’t post a lot this week because Zane was keeping very, very busy.  I had our apartment clean, OCD clean, on Monday of this week.  By Thursday I was in tears because I had seriously lost the battle despite my best efforts.  Zane was determined to get into everything.  He discovered the joy of top shelves this week.  He unstrung all of my embroidery threads, stung yarn around, rubbed handfuls of body lotion in his hair (although he did smell flowery for a while), destroyed bars of soap, scattered flour, made fruit salad in the carpet, got a few handfuls of bisquick thrown (caught him doing that before he dumped the entire Sam’s size box), drug all the clean laundry out of his drawers, scattered shoes, unmade beds,…oh, there was so much more, but my brain is trying not to remember right now. 

Here is an example of his handiwork.  This is our storage closet for things we don’t use very often, like my make-up.    (oh yeah, he also tried to put powder on and was working on the foundation bottle when I discovered that adventure).  On the top shelf of the closet was this –>

It is a hand print kit from Grandma and includes two packages of powder to be mixed with water.  Thank goodness I found him before he had opened them because both would have been a true disaster.  He has been obsessed with this thing.

He got to it by creating the tower you see to the left.  A dining room chair (that had to be drug over a bed and down a hall to get to this position without detection), a overturned laundry basket (which is where all the clothes come from) and the crate that holds the mega blocks (you can guess where they went).  Although I admire the ingenuity….  

I can only guess that he was bored, since he got most of his toys taken away from throwing them after a warning that the toys would go bye-bye if he threw them again.  What a freakin’ week.  I am tired.  I was glad to have the playgroup to go to yesterday because I was at the end of my rope. I was also tired of hearing Zach bitch about his behavior every moment he was home.  Do your flippin’ homework in your office at school if you are so irritated…you are just compounding my world when you do something irritating every time Zane does something irritating.  Husbands! Grrrrrrrr.

In one of my efforts to distract him from swinging the paintings on the wall and destroying the blinds, I grabbed the camera and got a few cute shots of the little stinker.

see how innocent he looks

mid-air, jumping (hence the hair flying out)

I did have a bright spot this week.  Fluffy mail!   My XXL Fuzibunz I ordered from Lil’ Bunz came.  I got shockingly fast service.  I ordered them over the weekend, she mailed them on Monday and I got them on Tuesday.  I also got 3 white XXl FBs from the Cloth Corner at a great price.  Those came in a timely manner too…Wednesday I think.  I know they aren’t particularly exciting diapers, but I was very happy to get them  We went ahead and got XXL since they aren’t going to make them anymore and I don’t want to run into this problem again.  He is at the bottom of the size range for them, so they are somewhat big, but you can’t find diapers this size elsewhere. 

My diapers and freebee wipe

for a reference, here is the new orange XXL FB next to a red XL FB I have

The only down side is that I was getting ready to order some infant prefolds to stuff them with and then our electricity bill came.  So, I have been knitting some inserts out of scraps of cotton yarn.  It seems to work pretty well.  A bit labor intensive, but I can use something I have without having to rip up clothes, so that is good.

Hopefully this next week will be a little better.  I am going to try and get him out to a park or something like that for a while every day, and we restored his toy collection.  Of course, despite that, he is standing on his head against a wall and singing loudly in the living room right now.  *sigh*  gotta go. 

AP Playgroup…met some MDC Mamas!

For the first time we were able to make it to the new AP playgroup in town.  We went to the Art Museum and the kids had their picture taken and then made picture frame collages.   Note that Zane wouldn’t even hold still for the picture.  *sigh*  He had a lot of fun gluing stuff to the frame and fooling with all the little do-dads.

Zane’s finished frame

After the museum, we went to the park next to Exploration Place.  It was 85 degrees and sunny with a nice breeze.  There isn’t any shade at this park to speak of, so it felt really hot to me since we are still accustomed to winter weather around here.

Here is Zephyr, Bianca’s son bringing his treasured truck to the playground

He insists Zane take it.  It was really sweet because he wouldn’t let go until Zane finally took it.

Of course, he did want it back.   Here the boys are putting sand into the truck.

Here is the majority of the group.  In the foreground is Natalya’s son Zane, and Natalya.  Standing around behind is Robert, holding Cody, Me, Dori holding Eilysh, and Bianca

Here is Zephyr climbing (near his truck) and Alex (Robert’s oldest)

Here is little Zane finding a cozy spot under the seat in a stroller.

My Zane playing the chimes

Zane and Zephyr

Trying to get a picture of these three was interesting.  (Robert’s family went home early because Cody overheated).  We never did get a great shot, but here are the attempts.

The Z-crew….Zephyr, Zane, & Zane  (interesting note…my Zane and Zephyr are exactly 1 year and 2 days apart in age)

 I hope we can repeat this.  It was nice being able to hang out with some other mamas and be able to appreciate things like “the bug pattern Happy Heiny” and “Moss Feet Shoes” little Zane was wearing.  We didn’t get to do a lot of talking since one or another of us was always running after a boy, but it was nice to just have some adult conversation.  I left thinking of all the things I wish I said, or talked about, or asked them…I get so nervous meeting new people.  By the time I left my lip was bright red and cracked from biting it so much. lol.