Young looking parent

I never said it before but suddenly there it was: as the my son’s friend came in carrying his sleeping three year old, I thought, “he looks much too young to be the father of one little girl let alone the father of six children ranging up to ten years old.” His wife looked as impossibly young when she entered with another sleepy child.
I can’t believe I had judged them as too young. After all I was ten years younger than either of them when I was parenting a household of five boys – ten years old and younger with the oldest three topping out at nine – and ten-years-old.
However mature and capable I considered myself as a twenty-something caring for children, my perspective has changed greatly since then. In the wee hours of that night, this grandmother realized she had crossed another age barrier. No time to consider all that, we had sleepy children tumbling in to the house, and just like the poem “Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John”, they pulled off their shoes (or had them taken off) and collapsed into bed, clothes and all. It’s a long drive from Amarillo, Texas.
We quietly welcomed our weekend guests, showed them their beds and slipped into our own.
The next morning, in the light of the new day none of them looked as young or as fragile as they had the night before. We got acquainted over a breakfast of eggs and bagels. The children milled around, eating breakfast, helping each other and their mom, finding their clothes and the toys I dragged out of the attic and toy cupboard for their enjoyment.
The bibliophiles quickly found the shelves of children’s books and stood in front of the shelf as if too stunned to even sit down as they read one book after another. It has been a few years since my boys discovered the same books but the appeal remains. I love to see a child caught up in a good book, especially perennial favorites like the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and the Great Brain. The younger ones crowded up close when we read aloud Dr. Seuss or Berenstain Bear books.
I broke open a new bag of marbles and they arranged and rearranged the red, blue, green and yellow pieces of the marble slide. My sons’ construction sets came off the shelf to inspire a new generation of architects configuring towers and space ships.
My husband swept the big boys off for a 45 walk to discover the pond in the wild woods of Parkers Chapel. They returned two hours later with new stuff for their treasure boxes: rocks, leaves and weeds. Their little sisters, and the brother who stayed behind, joined me for a tea party with the tea set my daughter brought home from China. We sat on my bed drinking water for tea and sharing a single crumbled cookie. The tea lid fell into the cups a time or two, the comforter was a damp by the time we finished, but they had a good time and their parents enjoyed a few minutes of quiet.
Before they left Tuesday morning, the eight-year-old proudly showed me his journal of their trip. While I had been noting how young his family looked, he had been writing a few notes of his own about us. It was a fun to have children in the house again – perhaps they will come again sometime.