Grandkids Are Neat; But They Leave You Beat

Our oldest son and his wife had an opportunity to visit Las Vegas for a week with a group of family and friends. They have two daughters, ages seven and five. They asked if we would watch the girls while they were gone, making sure the girls got to their various schools, Girl Scout meeting, pre-school and religious education class. Sure, we said, assuming that we would have at least three hours a day for chores, shopping and miscellaneous.

Well, a strange thing happened to Iowa this week. It got moved to North Alaska. Honestly, we got seven and half inches of snow locally Tuesday night resulting in all the local schools being closed Wednesday, then an Arctic zephyr came to town leaving us with colder temperatures than they were experiencing in Nome Alaska. So, the schools were closed Thursday and again Friday.

Ever been cooped up with two dynamos for three days. It was too cold to let them go out to play, so grandma and I were their primary diversion and entertainment. Now, grandma has the knack of getting into their imagination games, something that is not in my repertoire of grandfatherly skills. I'm their coach and mentor on computer games that we have accumulated through four grand kids, the Fisher Price, Putt Putt, Pajama Sam and Jump Start kinds of games. So they cycled between the two of us for three days.

Well, on Friday, our oldest grandson who is fourteen, came over since he didn't have school and our other local daughter-in-law dropped off our youngest granddaughter, aged one, to watch while she worked. Talk about a house full! The only up side was that the four of them kind of entertained each other, but grandma and I were kept busy refereeing, cooking and nursing bruised flesh or egos.

I can tell you that picking up our oldest son and his wife Friday night was the highlight of our day. We got them home with kids and a truck load of clothes, games, puzzles and a lasagna that grandma made for them. Then we made a bee line home, grabbed a wine for grandma and a Captain Morgan's for grandpa and unwound! Slept like a babe that night!

We do love our grand kids and enjoy having them here, but getting older exacts its price! Grandma raised three boys grouped nineteen months apart for the two older sons and then five years later for the youngest son while I worked the typical fifty hours or more a week expected of engineers back then plus traveled about half the time, monitoring vendor quality compliance. Now even having one baby all day leaves us knowing we have been busy. And with four......

I just remembered one of my favorite anecdotes about having children. As I said, our two oldest were nineteen months apart and the youngest was almost five years later. That is the source of this remembrance.

One morning at breakfast, grandma mentioned she would like to try for a girl. We often discussed things that we wanted to keep from the boys at breakfast as they slept as late as we would let them. I was neutral but said something to the effect: "If we are going to, we need to do it now because I'll be pushing sixty when they are in college and the way industry dumps older employees, we may not be able to afford college for another one.". Grandma though for a few minutes and said, "let me think it over a while before we decide".

So we did.

Two or three weeks later, maybe a month even, Grandma again raised the subject at breakfast. She said that it wasn't a good idea since both boys were out of diapers, the oldest was starting Kindergarten and she was beginning to have so time to herself for the first time since we started our family. I said okay, it's up to you. Then she jumped up, ran to the bathroom and lost her breakfast. And it wasn't a girl after all.