Grandkids visit

The Michigan grandchildren had one question when their grandfather came to pick them up for a summer visit, “Do you have any toys at your house?”
He assured them that we had lots of toys at our house. As my househusband, he wasn’t worried about toys, he had a list of ‘things-to-do’ with the grandchildren while I slave over a computer at work.
Within minutes of entering our house, they found the toys and stripped the shelves free of them.
With no parents around to buffer the responsibility, my husband and I quickly realized anew how much time and energy it takes to live with children.
I missed most of the energy sapping fun. My house husband cooked breakfasts, supervised pick-up times and shuttled them back and forth to the swimming pool and Vacation Bible School during the week. In between he worked in science lessons with the bugs of summer and math lessons at the department store.
Having children re-charged my domestic button. I pulled out material I had picked up at garage sales thinking I might be able to use it in making quilts and decided it looked like material for little girls dresses. I found an old pattern and asked the girls which printed material they would choose for a sun dress.
They chose. I sewed. The oldest told me what the dresses needed to make them really pretty. I made adjustments and – after a couple nights with very little sleep – I finished the last seam and sewed on the last button.
Saturday morning I finally had all day at home. I pulled out the mixer, the flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda to make cookies.
I knew it was going to be an interesting morning when one of the girls asked me, “what’s that?” pointing to the mixer. She thought all hot, fresh cookies came from slice and bake tubes of cookie dough.
“A mixer.”
“What’s it for?”
“We use it to mix up the ingredients for cookies.” I held it over the bowl and turned it on.
“Cool! I wanna do that.”
I handed her an apron and we began. She packed brown sugar into the measuring cup three times before I declared it full enough to dump. The first egg she added to the bowl crumbled in her hands. The next one I showed her how to open like a box. She got the hang of that ‘cool’ mixer quickly as we whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Her sisters followed with rich chocolate cookies and oatmeal cookies.
Everyone ate cookie dough and tested fresh homemade cookies. The math lesson of the day was that three dips of the 1/3 cup measuring cup would exactly fill the one cup scoop.
”Cool!” our astute observer said.
For science each analyzed the eggs: The first thought they were messy and gooey and shrank from touching them. The second wanted to touch them and the third just looked and smiled.
Cooking, math and science lessons done for the day, they disappeared while I hosed down the kitchen.
They were so quiet that I walked through the house looking for them. I found the youngest in the living room playing with the dolls in a story she made up. The middle sister had taken over their bedroom with building blocks; and the oldest camped in our bedroom between the fragile Victorian wooden doll house and the sturdy, modern plastic doll house moving furniture and dolls from one house to the other as needed.
They had found the toys – and many other things – at grandpa’s house.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)