Being Grandma

Here's Quincy, the love of my life, our youngest grandson playing a drum. He's here for five days, and this is the end of day two. We are old, closing in on seventy, still spry (but not sharp as tacks, that description comes later.) He came on the day after we had arrived back from a week in New York City, exhausted from the intensity of so many people and so much wonderful stimulation of art and music and drama and old friends (and heavy colds we were fighting. )

So we are here in this rural paradise of intense green of early foliage, the vegetable garden full of too many vegetables to count. The birds crabbed at us to get those feeders going! Two hummingbirds actually landed on my wrist as I was hanging up their feeder with new nectar.

Quincy went out with us this morning after we hung out the laundry on the clothes line to check out the sand hill cranes nesting on the pond. We could see the two enormous eggs they are hatching in their big nest of sticks and grass surrounded by a mote. Quincy and I had our binoculars at the ready and we watched the parent birds changing places on the nest.

A young four year old listens to a different internal drummer. At the request of "Get your shoes on. We're going out now," he takes ten minutes. He has to find the shoes, and along the way, his attention is distracted by any number of things calling for his attention. We grandparents are learning to be more mellow (more ketchup?), and wait patiently for everything to come together.

Grandpa and Grandma usually lead a purposeful life where we devote blocks of time to our work. All this purpose flies out the window when Quincy is here. We negotiate for time; You take him while fixing dinner and I can get in a half hour to work on that quilt or painting. I'll be on tap for three hours in the afternoon. Andy is great with taking Quincy to do errands and a grocery run. My specialty is the bedtime routine of bath and stories and many hugs.

The most exhausting thing is the negotiation of everything and the "Why's". I appreciate these qualities, but I find it so tedious. You can't just jump into the car and go when you need to. With a four year old, you must first alert him to the plan, find shoes, go pee, find necessary items such as the favorite toy, and water bottle. Then you must install a car seat and insert the child, contorting yourself to click the seat belt. In doing a series of errands you must de-insert the child because, of course you can't leave a kid for even a few minutes alone in a car. After awhile you begin to think that no trip is worth it, so we'll look in the freezer and garden and make do.

After Quincy goes to bed, my life is mine again. I know that tomorrow he'll be awake early anticipating a hearty farm breakfast. I'll go up to his room and pull up the shades. We'll gaze out across the field and pond looking for the possibilities for this day. We'll smell the pancakes, and for once Quincy is out of his pajamas and into his clothes in a flash.