Weekend Grandchild

My hands smell clean like fresh baby and just washed strawberry blond hair. I arrive down at the barn/studio complex and see the Christmas lights twinkling. Quincy turned them on earlier. The yard is littered with balls and bats and sandbox toys. After his bath, I have just put Quincy, now two and a half, to bed in his big boy youth crib.Quincy is spending the weekend with his grandparents, two of many who love and adore him.

He has kissed his grandpa goodnight and gathered up his things ( eight dead racquet balls, two 'loveys', a toy airplane, and a tiny bed with a very teeny girl doll in it, and a large stuffed rabbit. This guy needs his gear.) He sits cuddled on my lap in the rocking chair that once held his mother and we read "Goodnight Moon". His eyes begin to close. It is a moment of incredible sweetness and possibility. I breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, I can have some time of my own.

Quincy is the fifth of six grandchildren, the youngest boy. All of them are wonderful, blessed to be healthy and bright. They come to visit and we are thrilled. We try to visit the faraway places the other five live as often as we can. The three oldest grandchildren lived near us when they were very small, so we have some sense of them. They have come back regularly to visit and we look forward to those long summer visits.

But Quincy lives nearby and never a week goes by when we do not see him. We see all those incremental milestones of development. Quincy started out premature, a tiny thing, so skinny, and now he is huge for his age! We hear all the verbal development going on, and we note his amazing gifts for figuring out how everything works. Tonight I asked him to help me set the table for dinner. He got out a huge ugly plastic pitcher and proceeded to fill it with water from the fridge. I put a candle out, he got forks, and we were all set.

We have spent the day doing this and that-grocery shopping, checking out a local business cen ter, visiting a wonderful local playground, and calling on neighbors who have a new orphaned calf who must be bottle fed. Quincy toted his racquet balls- looking like a person struggling to carry a water heater- to all of these things, and was interested in everything.

This lovely boy, so young, is getting so many experiences, as such children do. (I carefully show him a green anole lizard and also a Florida fence lizard. We check out the differences. And who knows if he pays attention at his age?) But it is mulch for the mind! My neighbor's grandson, a four year old, was helping his granddad get ready to raise an orphan calf.

So many of those good and patient children at Lacoochee Elementary School have never had these everyday experiences that mulch their minds. Go places, talk about what you see and what you think. Read a book, stroke a tree frog, pick vegetables, feed an orphan calf, and maybe see a real city. They have no parents or mentors who could be interested.

Andy and I and Quincy, squinched up tight in the golf cart, rode back down the road from seeing the new calf. Quincy was blowing bubbles from his little bottle as we went and the breeze from the motion of the golf cart made many bubbles trail out behind us. We looked at each other, delighted in the day.