The Grands Are Coming! The Grands Are Coming!

S, J and Memere, cooking

"What a bargain grandchildren are! I give them my loose change and they give me a million dollar's worth of pleasure!"      Gene Perret

Tomorrow I will disappear amid a tangle of small arms and legs and grinning faces and won't reappear until Saturday the 27th. All three of my grandchildren will be here though the smallest, my little Bean, will go back home Monday. The older two, S who is 10 and J who is 8, will spend the rest of the week with me.

The days take on a new order when they are here. The moment all our eyes open we spring from bed, hustle into our clothes and take the Secret Path to the farm next door. We'll bring our table scraps and vegetable peelings to the pigs, stop at the chicken house door so J can practice his cocka-doodle-do, pull several handsful of succulent grasses for the cows, and pat the wooly sheep. When our tummies start to growl we'll head back to the cottage for cow pancakes and chocolate syrup. (One of the farm cows is a Belted Galloway, an Oreo cookie of a cow, black on either end with a white stripe around its middle. I have a cow pancake mold and the kids like making their own Belted Galloways with the chocolate.)

Once the breakfast dishes are washed and the beds are neatly made, we settle in for some serious play. If the day is hot, we'll don bathing suits and head for my brother's backyard pool. If the morning is cool, we might take our bicycles to the town park and zip around the trails there, taking time to swing on the swings and climb on the jungle gym. If it's a rainy day, the closet is crammed with paper and pencils, pens and crayons, paints and brushes, scissors and glue just waiting to make imaginative crafts. In a large basket are stuffed animals, toy cars, a Slinky or two, some small puzzles, and several balls. In another box, dolls sleep in their best dresses, their eyes closed until some small tot wakes them. The town library beckons, the pond across the street hosts bullfrogs and turtles and ducks and a couple of muskrat families. There's always something to discover there.When evening brings a weariness to our limbs and darkness to the skies, we will make some popcorn and curl up on the big bed, pillows stuffed behind us, and watch a movie. 

There won't be time to read (or write) blog posts, so once the week has passed and the cottage empties out, once the noise and the flurry have subsided, when the silence and the missing grow too much for me, I will return to my regular life, and here.