Joyfulness of a second childhood
Grandkids bring out hidden talents
I think I might have missed my calling. Either that or I am entering my second childhood, which I hope isn’t the case because there are elements of my first one that are still with me.
Or maybe I’m delusional. I will have four or five, grandchildren visiting for almost a week, without their parents, but with their grandmothers, my sisters. I am so looking forward to it. In fact I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about anything.
I am looking forward to being together with my sisters, too, but excited is a bit of a stretch.
I should have been someone whose job it is to play with little kids but not to have to worry about them. I don’t even know what that job would be; teachers have to work too hard; camp counsellors and daycare operators have serious responsibilities even when they’re doing fun activities.
I was a parent volunteer at Brownie camp once. I had to come up with an outdoorsy craft. I had them make a bird feeder out of a one-litre milk carton covered with things gathered from the woods. I still remember how much fun I had.
Then there was my cooking prowess. I thought I was doing pretty good, cooking pancakes for more than 50 kids on a wood stove that kept going out. Not a problem. I got the job done and was resting on my laurels when a little girl yelled “There’s matchstick in my pancake.” Did I panic? Did I ’eck as like! “You win the prize” I exclaimed, pulling a chocolate bar out of nowhere.
So, as you can see, I had a talent even back then. It might have changed my life if playing with children had been seen as a life option in Corner Brook in the mid-sixties. As we saw it, successful girls either became nurses, secretaries, teachers or married a Mountie. I did neither and have trod a winding but interesting road searching for my true calling ever since.
I have a great time when my four-year-old grandson sleeps over, even if I often end up going to bed at the same time he does. We have an art box and a craft box; we make tents and play hide and seek indoors and out (not at the same time). Hide the clothes pin has become a favourite, and days after he’s gone home, I chuckle when I come across a clothes pin snapped on to the back of a lampshade or the edge of a dish cloth. Newman says it’s a miracle I ever find the ones in the kitchen. Ha ha.
The boys are eight, six, almost five and four. Our lone girl is three. The two older boys have electronic “devices.” That will be keep them occupied on the plane, but I have declared Heart’s Content a device-free zone for children.
Aside from usual water, beach, rocky shoreline things that can keep kids, especially city kids, entertained for hours, we have a big table in the sheshed for painting rocks and making fairy and gnome gardens. We have big stumps of wood for sitting around the fire pit at the beach and the beginnings of small enchanted garden enclosed by the two sheds and a giant laburnum.
My plan is that I will make the sacrifice of being in charge of the kids until bedtime. My lucky sisters will get to do grown-up things like cooking and cleaning up and getting them settled down.
I haven’t planned one meal, but I have been collecting thrift-store objects to be reimagined for the use of fairies and gnomes. Yesterday I spent a whole hour augmenting my finds with stuff from Dollarama.
There are sticks and stones to be collected, moss and tiny plants gathered, bark and who knows what to be searched out from the wood shed, tiny houses to be painted and decorated, roads to be made, bridges to build, tiny clothes lines to be constructed for tiny clothes hung with tiny clothes pins.
And if my rose-coloured glasses get broken, the other grandmothers, who don’t yet know the plan, are close by.
As we saw it, successful girls either became nurses, secretaries, teachers or married a Mountie. I did neither and have trod a winding but interesting road searching for my true calling ever since. “… I have declared Heart’s Content a device-free zone for children.”