Thank you so much for coming to help us celebrate our sister, Andrea. For those of you who don’t know the back-story of Andrea’s life, she was not born developmentally disabled. She was a beautiful, healthy baby who was thriving until she contracted encepelitits. This is not about disability, this is about ability. What she did, and did very well. I am going to share a few fond and personal memories about the incredible joy and blessing that was Andrea. Our theme today if it isn’t obvious, is her love of all things Batman. Did you know that Ann had super-human strength? Just talk to any one of us in the family, the staff here at Mt. St. Joseph, and we will tell you that it could take four or more people to move her if she protested, and …show more content…
She had a routine of bathing in the morning, and to put it mildly, she liked to stick to it. If she was, et hmmm, protesting that I was attempting to shower her at night, let’s just say things got very difficult for me to get her in the shower. However, I had it a little easier than the four or more Mt. St. Joseph staff that had to coax her into the shower. She may have kept walking out of the shower, capping back up the soap, pushing me away, . I’d just called for Mom. That worked every time. All Mom had to say, sternly I might add, were three magic words, “get in there” and Andrea moved. . . and …show more content…
As a little girl I would teach her songs, and within a couple of minutes of my singing them to her, she had the melody down pat, and did her best with the words. We would sing with abandon to “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “She Loves You Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”, “Hide Your Love Away”, and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” to name a few. I’ve never been able to hear those songs without thinking of Andrea. When I would pick her up from Mt. St. Joseph, the first thing she would want on after I turned the engine over was the music. One gorgeous spring day I picked her up for a visiting weekend and drove her to Mom and Dads. We were driving down Rand Road, had the windows lowered, and were singing at the top of our lungs. Talk about people staring at two grown women in a van. We got quite a lot of looks. Didn’t matter either, because we were having the time of our lives. The greatest thing about being with Andrea is that it gave me license to be a kid. Be as goofy as I wanted and not care what others thought. That was magical. One last truly amazing memory I’d like to share is her love of playing baseball when she was younger. When we were living in Oak Park, we lived across the street from a huge park. It had several baseball fields. Mom would have me cross the street as a very young girl, and play baseball with