“To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn) . . . ”
Bill and I have become great grandparents! The years have sped by so that I didn’t realize how old we’ve become. The birth of Adalyn Grey Millhouse, daughter of grandson Chris and his wife Tasha, set me to pulling up images from the trunks in my mental attic where nothing is lost. It seems like only yesterday that we took baby Vicki home to the double that we were renting.
After what I think of as the Ritter Avenue years, Vicki married and became a mother. Billy was followed by identical twins Chris and Tony. I spent a week helping out after the twins were born. I’d put a twin on each shoulder and sing the old lullabies that generations of parents and grandparents have sung. As Bill’s mother had sung to baby Vicki, I sang, “Deedle, deedle dumpling, my son John went to bed with his stockings on . . .” While I rocked the twins, toddler Billy would throw himself across my knees and sob because there wasn’t room for him.
Vicki said, “I can’t quite understand it, but becoming a grandmother feels different.” I know what she means. Someone said, “If I’d known that grandkids were such fun, I’d have had them first!” Amen to that! I’ve loved being a grandparent. We are the worry-free fun patrol. We don’t have to force the grandkids to do homework, eat spinach or practice the piano.
The grandboys quickly learned that the consequences of unacceptable conduct were immediate. We never said, “One . . . two . . . three . . . “ Once when we were taking the boys home after a visit, they were squabbling in the back seat. “You quit that right now, or we won’t stop at McDonalds for dinner.” They paid no attention, and the car was filled with gloom when we drove past the McDonalds and took them home to a dinner of peanut butter sandwiches. After that their behavior in the car was much improved.
Images as if from a mental slide show keep popping up: I cut windows in the boxes that our new kitchen cabinets came in and turned them into a house. Uh-oh. I heard shrieks of laughter. Billy was inside, and Tony and Chris were throwing 25 pounds of birdseed on him and the driveway. “You boys are to pick up every single seed!” It took them an hour.
Here’s Bill walking with the twins, each hanging on to an index finger . . . The grandboys sit at the bar while I cook pancakes. Chris’s “pancake bear” tries to steal them . . . I hear giggling after they put an Irvington Halloween Festival plastic spider in a cabinet drawer . . . When they take a bath together in my new soaking tub I reach around the corner and turn on the jets. Shrieks, a flurry of arms and legs and a flooded bathroom result . . . countless games of Candy Land, Old Maid, Monopoly and Canasta . . . a camping trip to Colorado where their favorite thing was a metal horse tank with rattlesnakes that rattled satisfyingly when they kicked the tank . . . prom pictures . . . Bill in military gear, leaving for Iraq . . . Tony and Chris sitting on the steps of the U.S. Capital with us during a July 4 celebration . . . graduations . . . Tony and Chris in Paris with us . . . news of jobs . . . weddings . . . Chris, Tony and their Grandpa working a jigsaw puzzle at a beach house last summer . . .
And now the birth of a new person . . . Thinking about little Adalyn, I see that everything is progressing as nature intends. Her birth symbolizes the continuation of the family and hope for the future. wclarke@comcast.net