The family gathering

We had barely put down our suitcases for the holiday family gathering at the resort when we had a tempest in our little teapot of a three-year-old.
“I want to be four,” Caroline pouted.
“You will be four in April,” we assured her.
But she wanted to be four now, just like her cousins – Olivia, who had just turned four, and Sophia, just a month from her fifth birthday.
We rationalized. We reasoned. Finally I said, “Okay, Caroline, you are four years old minus four months.”
She smiled and returned to playing with her cousins, assured that she was their equal.
The older granddaughters ignored their age differences. They could play games with each other any day.
The babies and toddlers did not mind the age difference either. As long as they had Uncle Mark around with his elfish grin, they ran to welcome him and sat happily in his lap or played with toys as he laid down on the floor to watch them play. Something about Uncle Mark just grabs a little one’s attention at every gathering.
Seven-month-old Austin liked him, and anyone else who held and played with him. 19-month-old Daisy gave Uncle Mark a coy smile and chuckled at his silliness.
Sam, 2, played with the Fisher Price houses beside Daisy one afternoon. When she went to take a nap, he sat on his dad’s lap trying to fit the lens cap onto the camera until it snapped in place. With pride and pleasure in his voice he announced, “I did it!” Only then did his parents notice that their expensive camera had garnered so much pre-school interest.
While the adults chatted and teased each other about political differences, everyone eight and under slipped into the master bedroom. They bounced on the king-sized bed, dragged the covers and pillows off the bed to build a fort, turned off the lights and hid in their secret hideout in the closet behind a pile of pillows.
I could not find them when I entered the room. I turned on the light in the too quiet room.
Little heads popped up from behind the pillows, “Turn off the light!”
I grinned, quietly turned off the lights and left.
While their mothers fixed massive suppers of spaghetti and meatballs, breakfast casseroles and dinners of leftovers, I sat down to play games. The grandchildren around the table had never played Risk before. I had forgotten most of the rules. We read, moved tokens, tossed dice, read some more rules, and worked our way through a game.
Then we cleared off the table and started a game of Scrabble using more words than we actually knew. Impatient to get on with laying out words, we switched to Speed Scrabble. Each player received an equal number of tiles and each began making a personal crossword puzzle using as many of their tiles as possible in the set time. We had fun even if some teenager pulled out a Latin word or two to confuse the issue.
I tried Hogopoly, the Arkansas version of Monopoly, but since I know the original game so well I stepped out of the game and urged the 14-year-old, who did not know the game, to take my place.
During a lull as the little ones napped, a couple of the teens grabbed a 100-piece puzzle and assembled it to pass the time.
They brought me the completed puzzle with a picture of a pink princess, asking, “Do you have any more puzzles?”
I started to say “No” before I remembered the 600-piece puzzle shaped like a lighthouse we had ready to pass along to their great-uncle.
They spread the pieces out on the coffee table and began working. When the little ones woke up, we covered it over with paper until they went to bed. At 2 a.m., they posted a picture of the finished puzzle on Facebook. Their parents helped them finish it.
During another lull, I pulled out the colorful tea set I had tucked into my stash of toys.
“That is beee-uu-tiful,” Sophia , reaching for the teapot. We filled it with water, took out a few small sweets and snacks and the pre-school crew commenced their afternoon tea at the coffee table. Sam plodded his way through as many of the sweets as he could grab and tolerated the tiny cups of water.
I filled the teapot, watched the children fill their own teacups, wiped up spills, grabbed bits of sweets from the floor and observed, “the pictures of children having tea parties with their grandmothers never look like this.”
The little ones ignored me and continued to slosh through their tea party fun with no more tempests, large or small, in the teapots during our busy holiday gathering.