Three days of being nice

“You are so nice. My mother would never have given me a quarter for the toy machines in the grocery store,” my son’s wife, Alexis bubbled.
“Enjoy it while you can. I never did it for my children, either,” I said.
“For the next three days you are company. That’s my limit for treating anyone as company.”
My daughter silently agreed and grabbed a quarter while she could.
Patty, my stepson’s wife, took due note of our conversation. She, my stepson and their two daughters had come for a short visit after providing a ride home for my son from his summer session at Notre Dame. It was the first chance Patty and Alexis had to meet each other.
For weeks I had stocked up on sale items from the grocery store, sodas, bread, steak, ham, chicken, ice ream and treats. I had enough for three days of company-sized meals.
The week before they came my teens were off to camp and my husband went on a business trip. I cleaned floors, cleared clutter out of the corners and each day made a different kind of bake it later cookie dough or banana bread to store in the freezer. In-between activities, I read books and magazines soaking up the silence and solitude. When the crowd came, I was ready.
To ensure lots of time to interact, we crammed three families into our three-bedroom suburban home with a cot in the laundry room.
Fortunately for bed space, my youngest son had to work nights that weekend. I found a full-sized bed at a garage sale for his room and stuck the “not year married a year” couple in there. My daughter lost her bed as we made a king-sized pad on the floor with twin mattresses. But we all lost the living room when my granddaughters and daughter were sleeping no the fold-out couch and love seat.
Unfortunately, with my youngest son working, he was not there for most of the family reunion. I did send embassies with meals, but we were all glad when he was finally home to sit and chat a while.
A chat we did. Except for a muted TV showing the Olympic tryouts, noisy electrical entertainment was off-limits for the extended weekend. We talked and laughed at our family foibles. Some can’t say no to anything; others say no every time without even thinking about it. My daughters-in-love swapped histories f meeting, marrying and managing their Hershberger men.
We re-hashed whose idea it really was that all the boys ended up with butch haircuts every spring. Each remembered it differently, but everyone recognized that as young adults four out of five had elected for much longer styles.
The granddaughters, who are slightly younger than my daughter chatted, played games and continued their long-distance friendship. The last night they all slept together on the fold-out couch. The next morning they lay, three in a row and pointed fingers at the bed hogs of the night. Too soon, the three days were over. The married men and families left. And I could quit being nicer than any mom ever was, including me, — my three days were up.