“It’s a rule that grandparents have to have interesting things.”
I didn’t know that! Not until the Pennsylvania grandkids came last week and repeatedly told us that grandparent rule.
They said it shortly after they arrived and had spread out through the house in search of the interesting stuff — which they quickly found and took down from shelves to study further.
The oldest grandson re-appeared with a collection of pebbles, rocks, an arrow head and shark teeth from the Crater of Diamonds — that I found at a yard sale.
“This is so cool,” he kept exclaiming. His wanted to identify those rocks – wanted to do so enough that he pulled out the R encyclopedia, the M encyclopedia for Mohs Scale of hardness of rocks and minerals and finally logged onto the Internet for identification techniques.
Sorting the rocks, studying them, talking about them with me, his grin spread from ear to ear as he told me, “Grandparents have to keep interesting things around.”
Their dad came prepared to add to his son’s study in stones — he planned a day trip to the Diamond of Craters State Park. Gathering up shovels, a wheelbarrow, a rake, lunch and the audio version of the second Harry Potter book, the drive and the day proved interesting — even if we did swelter in the heat at the crater. We came home from a day rich with memories and a few quartz crystals.
Disregarding any disappointment at not finding a diamond, the grandkids began sharing with me their collection of jokes. A joke using names as puns reminded me of the classical comedian skit “Who’s on first?”
I called it up on YouTube and played it. The kids laughed and laughed and laughed. They laughed just as hard at hearing the old lines in 21st century kid voices as Abbott and Costello’s audience did in the pre-WWII era.
Then they replayed it a couple times and searched for other Abbott and Costello videos on YouTube.
“I could listen to this a thousand times. It is not like the comedians on TV. They say something and that’s it, but this I could listen to a thousand times,” our grandson said.
The next day, he and his sisters spontaneously re-enacted bits and pieces of the skit. When someone did not know the answer to a question and said, “I don’t know” they all chimed in, “Third base.”
“So who’s on first base?”
“That’s right.”
Their laughter lightened our day — when we saw them. My husband pulled out the ladder to snag a stray pine branch stuck on our roof. The kids asked if they could climb up with him.
We looked at their dad. Sure, from personal experience he knows we have a low angled roof over our one-story ranch house surrounded by lots of bushes and shrubs close to the house. A dogwood tree overhanging the house provided a quasi-club house effect with protection from the sun. The children sat up there reading the interesting books I have reclaimed from my childhood with online or used book stores. From their perch they enjoyed an entirely different perspective of the world around them.
Late at night, my husband took down the ladder and stored it away. However, by the time he sat down for breakfast, the ladder magically returned as the gateway to the roof. He could not believe they had done that without his help.
Building sets, the game of Life, books, trails of water from the pool lined with damp towels and energy filled the house for a couple days. They kept us as busy and interested in them as they were in us, then they loaded up and left us with an implied mandate to get busy and find more interesting things to show them the next time they come to visit.