My Grandchildren

These are my grandchildren:  From left to right:  Luis "Hooty"Ortiz.  I've called him Hooty since he was a baby.  When he was young, there was a hurricane that hit the South called Luis.  We had no word for Hurricane in Potawatomi so I asked this Mexican guy how to say it in his language.  He said "uh duh kon" (sorry for butchering the words) and in time he became known as Hooty.  Hooty is a freshman at Royal Valley High School.

Nyeh was keh is my oldest grandson.  When he was a baby he cried a lot until he got his Indian name and then he calmed down a bunch.  They would play pow-wow songs for him and that calmed him down too.  Nyeh was a top dancer and when he was just a little guy, he would go dance for Maynard and Coraline his great grandparents.  They sure enjoyed watching him. His other grandfather, Troy, taught him how to lead stomp dances. He graduated from Kickapoo Nation School and is a singer with a good voice and is picking up the songs well.  He is working now but we want him to go to school somewhere and I'm sure he will in time. 

"Kek kah kweh" or Kek was born on the day the Oklahoma City bombing took place in 1995 so out of that came life.  She had the most hair I ever saw on a baby and she was such a fragile baby.  Now she is a freshman at Royal Valley High School and has no interest in sports but she helps by being a manager on the baskeball teams.  I never pushed our kids and always left it up to them in this regard.  She volunteers for everything and is a licensed babysitter.  Kek won an award for her "Native Youth Outstanding Volunteer Work for the Health Initative Program 2009.'

I have wrote about my oldest granddaughter Tara on several occasions.  She was a top-of-the-line basketball player who accomplished a lot.  I'm proud of what she did and getting all those all-league awards was something I could never do, so she made up for that.  Now she is in sunny California where her husband is in the United States Marine Corp, and she will someday migrate back toward the middle of the country. She also does some outstanding beadwork.  Tara and her Mom work at this constantly and do some really good work.  Beading is still done here and something we haven't had to outsource to China yet.

The guy on the far right is "Pat ko shuk" and he is my youngest grandson but I call him "my boy."  I teach him prayer words, the words I learned from my mother, father-in-law and my aunt.  I feel so good to hear him learn so quickly.  He prays every night before we go to bed and I told him last night "your grandma Alberta would have felt so good to hear you pray" and she would have, but he can sure be a bad boy at times. too.  He is 9 years old.

I'm so thankful I lived this long to see my grandchildren get to this stage of life.