5-year-old tosses out grandpa’s dinner plans
Grandchildren have been described as:
“The dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.”
“A fine jewel set in an old ring.”
“God’s way of compensating us for growing old.”
My take is that grandchildren are nature’s way of reminding us not to make plans.
Last Friday, for instance, my 5-year-old stepgrandson and his parents fly in from Oregon to visit us for the weekend. In preparation, my wife bakes enough cookies to put the Keebler elves out of business while I plan a dinner schedule. On Friday, I figure, we’ll order in. On Saturday we’ll eat out. On Sunday I’ll cook pasta Bolognese.
But their flight arrives too late on Friday to order in and they aren’t hungry, anyway. Except for the 5-year-old, who eats most of the cookies before his mother takes him upstairs for bed.
Several minutes later, his mother calls from upstairs, “Can somebody bring me up a towel? No, wait … better make that a bucket.”
Having had children of our own, we know what this means. The kid’s tossing grandma’s cookies.
On Saturday he’s still not feeling well, so I spend the afternoon on which I’d planned to watch basketball watching cartoons with him instead.
A lot of them involve dinosaurs, ninjas and talking trains and they all sort of blur together. Although I do remember one in which what appears to be a blue warthog steals a giant egg from some flying cobras. Or maybe they were Samurai warriors.
By that evening it’s clear the kid’s in no shape to eat out, so we suggest to my stepson and his wife that they could go without us. The tire marks they leave peeling out still are on the driveway. As soon as they’re gone, the kid decides he’s hungry. There are no cookies left to toss, so my wife sends me to the store to get Jello cups and two boxes of Cheerios.
“Two boxes?” I ask. “He can’t be that hungry.”
“One has to be the regular variety and the other has to be fruit-flavored, because he’ll only eat them if they’re mixed together,” she explains.
At the store there’s an entire row of Cheerios: apple-cinnamon, honey nut, maple or frosted. What it doesn’t have is fruit-flavored. And the regular Cheerios are heart-shaped instead of being round. By now I don’t care what flavor they are or if they’re shaped like large intestines; the kid’s going to eat them and like it.
On Sunday evening I finally get the opportunity to make dinner, although not exactly what I’d planned. Still, I guess heart-shaped Cheerios with strawberry Jello for dessert is better than nothing.