thanksgiving music

Visiting grandchildren sing one of three songs: a slow, whine of “I can’t do it,” a tentative “Can I do that?” and an eager, upbeat, “Let me try, It’s my turn to do it.”
I had a whine of my own to sing before they came for Thanksgiving, “I don’t want to do all the cooking and cleaning and holiday preparations all by myself.” So I put on my upbeat marching tone and told everyone I expected them to pitch in and help out.
When the apple slicer/corer stuck half way through cutting up an apple, the oldest whined, “I can’t do it.” I told her to get on a higher chair and lean on it. In a couple minutes, still working alone, she sprinkled cinnamon sugar over her apple slices.
Before I made pies, I grabbed the first grandchild I could find, and asked her to pull out a large mixing bowl. We began cracking eggs and measuring sugar, spices and syrup for pumpkin pie and pecan pie. Her sister walked by as she was cracking eggs “let me crack an egg. It’s my turn.” She had to wait for the next cooking project. Her sister finished up the eggs and only a bit of egg oozed onto the floor and only a few pieces of eggshell needed to be fished out of the mixing bowl before we proceeded to the next step.
No one helped I turned on the blender to chop up cranberries for our fresh cranberry salad, but once the cranberries had marinated in pineapple juice with marshmallows for a while, I plopped down an apple, an orange and a banana, handed the oldest child a knife and told her to start cutting. She began slicing away at the side of the apple. I started to show her how I would do it, stopped and let her proceed – her method worked as good as anything I could show her.
When I told the grandchildren we would be injecting the turkey with marinade, their father looked at me skeptically, “We just baste it every so often.”
“This is a new idea that’s quite popular in this area – and it’s really good.” I assured him.
Before making grandchildren help, I laid down the law about the hypodermic looking injector, “this is only for using on the turkey. It is not for play.”
They nodded and began lining up for turns at pushing the plunger.
“Grandma, It’s coming back out.” they tittered when a small geyser erupted out of a hole.
After the fifth or sixth poke with the big needle, the youngest turned to me, “Does it hurt it?”
“No honey, it’s dead.”
She peeked inside the turkey, examining it closely.
“Can I touch it?”
I looked at the child. “Sure. If you want to.”
For the next five minutes she – and her sisters – giggled and checked out the raw, uncooked bird, both inside and out.
I did not insist that anyone else join me in the wee hours of the morning as I placed the bird inside my grandmother’s old turkey roaster and slid it into the oven to roast. I enjoyed the quiet of the house to organize my day and the dinner.
A couple hours later before ironing the cloth I used as a table runner, I called the children to come help. A word of caution about the heat of the iron and I stepped back to closely supervise the “It’s my turn” song of three children sharing one very hot iron.
The table looked beautiful, the turkey was golden brown, the skeptic declared the bird wonderfully moist and flavorful and the oldest insisted she had made the cranberry fruit salad all by herself.
Hey, I don’t care who gets the credit, I just don’t want to do all the work nor do I want to listen to an overload of the wrong kind of songs from the grandchildren.