Susiej

Not only did I overhear my kids talking about the pot of gold that was going to show up on St. Patrick’s Day (as it does every year) but I also learned from them that there was going to be an actual Scavenger Hunt to find the gold. Please.

Lifetimes are made up of the little things. But a Scavenger Hunt? That’s not just a little thing. But listening to those voices in my head repeating the words “it’s going to be so eggciting…” I had no choice but to start my clandestine efforts for the treasure. The pot of gold would be simply, chocolate coins. Except the store didn’t have them. The shamrock cookies I made, of course, were too sticky and gooey to cut, so I picked up store-bought shamrocks that looked better than anything I could have made. Snicker mini bars, wrapped in gold foil, and Hersey Almond Kisses, wrapped in gold, were added. (Thank you for that!)

A shinny metal bucket was stuffed, and the rest of the cookies and candy were hid in the oven to avoid an afternoon sugar-high.

The scavenger hunt clues?  Surprisingly, the clues did come easy. I thought about how to make them move from outside to in, into different floors. Figuring out how to get them there, turned into a chain of memories from the year that touched each one. Post-It notes were the perfect, stick-on medium.

The clues:

Where food melted because someone forgot…

(The freezer in the basement that was left open by accident.)

The first place you head to in winter mornings, hoping for some warm socks.

(The hot register threw them off… but it was actually the dryer.)

Now, take these to your room while you wait for your older brother to get home.

(Great way to incorporate a chore!)

The next clue was in the hallway outside of their room.

Where you tried to touch wire.

(They couldn’t figure this one out. That’s when they got the paper and started marking up the clues and making a treasure map. Finally, my oldest son came home and he was the only one who knew this one. When we first moved here, he thought it would be cool to stand on the roof of the tree house and try to touch the telephone wires. He didn’t.)

The smelly place where I once held office.

(Our mudroom is actually my old office space.)

What code was created on a cold icy day?

(The littlest one got this one… the garage door was fixed, and we created for the first time, a pass for out keypad outside the garage door. I stuck the clue to the inside of the garage door; but of course, they punched in the code, and up went the garage door. But not to worry. “Oh, there it is,” as it tumbled to the garage floor cement. )

Now, pour yourself a glass of milk, to get ready.

(No one bothered to take the time for that. They just pulled the clue off the milk.)

Where are the snowmen?

(Not those. The ceramic snowmen are still sitting in the hutch.)

And, there, in the waning glow of the afternoon sun, there was the pot of gold.

Now, they tell me, this is how they want to do Christmas.

Later that day…
I preheated the oven to 450 to make baguettes for dinner. There was an awful smell. It was, of course, the bags of snickers, kisses, and cookies in the plastic store-bought containers, melting all over the oven racks.

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Filed under: Laugh, boy, holidays by SusieJ - 2 Comments →

For years, Carl has served as the perfect guardian for a little girl. Carl is a black dog that babysits while Mom goes on numerous adventures in the adorable series of children’s picture books by Alexandra Day. Carl was doing just fine, until, the books came under scrutiny by a handful of critics who were appalled at the idea of putting a dog in charge of a child.  In a picture book.

It’s OK for a little girl to wander off in the woods and steal some bear’s porridge. And, don’t we all send little girls out to the woods to mingle with wolves? Only to be eaten later?  But a gentle dog playing with a baby? That’s, appalling.

In the book Carl’s Snowy Afternoon, Alexandra provides a babysitter. As Carl and the child watch mom and dad walk away, mom says,

“I hope that new sitter is reliable.”

Dad’s response? “Well, Carl’s there.”

And what does the babysitter do? She does exactly what babysitters do. She watches television.

While remaining oblivious to the fact that Carl and the baby are sneaking outside.

Priceless.

Carl takes her sledding.

And it’s Carl who makes sure to pinch the baby her lunch and gently feeds her.

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The wooden trains have been buried in their storage tub since that sick day when he built an un-Christmas train last year.  I made a good-faith effort to pull out the train and placed the tracks under the real Christmas tree this year; but the train was not embraced. In fact, it was simply ignored.  I even slid the already-decorated Christmas tree right across the floor to allow more “building” room for the track.  (Not one ornament was lost in the move.) Space, apparently, was not the problem. He had a change of heart.  Just like little Jackie Paper, one day he just found other things to occupy his time, besides trains.

When we opened the book to Puff, and sang the song about the little boy who left his childhood friend behind, I never thought we were reading a story about us.

So I asked him, “You’re really done with this train, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, without looking up from his latest Bionicle creation.

“Well, then, maybe we should pack it up , and find some other little boy who’d like to play with this train.”

“No, Mom,” he said. “Let me tell you how it’s gonna be.  When I’m all grown up, and I’m a Grandpa, you’re going to keep the train around, built all around your house so that you can remember me.”

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Years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, there was an email circulating, listing 10 reasons on how to tell if you’re ready to have kids. One of them was to throw broken glass all over the floor, and walk barefoot over the pieces. The experience was to prepare you for the pain you will encounter when you step on your kid’s legos. No amount of prep work can prepare you for that kind of pain.

My boys promise me that if I buy them plastic bins, they will sort each piece by color, and put them there every night.  (Yeah, right.)  Until then,

We spread them out on one big blanket. When they’re done, we just roll up the blanket and put them in a basket.

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Once his big brothers have left for school, leaving the kitchen in a scattered mess of opened cereal boxes, bowls of half-eaten cereal in soggy milk, sticky messes of milk spots all over the table, he pulls out his instruments and begins his morning work, creating worlds that are home to only his favorite colors.

Thankful for half-day kindergarten.

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Her presence was a constant in my childhood. Hers was the big wide chest I snuggled on as an infant, the shoulder I cried on, the large lap I sat on with scraped knees and bee stings, and the sounding board against the bullies at school. She was my shield when my parents were too harsh.

She understood that childhood served one purpose; to eat all the sugary-home-made jam you could fit on a single piece of buttered toast.  Christmas was for popcorn balls, and yet she shooed every child in her kitchen out when the hot syrup was just about to be poured on the marble slab on the days she made hard-tack candy, for fear that someone would get burned.

When the men’s work pants, shirts, or the sisters’ summer dresses became too worn for patches; she used her seam ripper to take off every single button, to save them in a tin. For what? For the odd button that bounced off a blouse?  She had oodles of buttons – beyond the limit of what she could actually ever use.

As I run my fingers through these tins, the discs slip between my fingers like satin against my skin — can you hear that sound of applause they make as they clink against each other? I wonder now if maybe Grandma had stepped out of her waste-not-want not mode with these buttons. Perhaps she saved them because she simply loved them; not because they were useful. These buttons glisten like massive jewels, and that would have been a luxury that was passed over by this depression-era girl that grew up working out in the onion fields. Her single indulgence. But, she never told me that.

She died while I was pregnant with my first son, in 1995. One morning, after pulling an all-nighter with my colicky baby, I learned that the young family that had moved into her farmhouse had a little girl; and Grandma, apparently, was looking after her. The girl’s favorite lost doll would suddenly appear the next morning in plain site – stuff like that.

I was crushed over this news. Grandma should have been there with me, to help me calm this baby. It was hard enough sharing her with my cousins and grand cousins — but now a complete stranger? It took some effort on my part, in those early days, to not associate every cry my son made with her absence in my life.

Although, she never did like to leave her house…

Since then, only one or two times, (this marks the third), have I ever let my mind drift to the reality that my little boys do not know about the taste of her jam, the feel of her lap, the comfort of her shoulder, the smell of her powder, and those eyes, so deep with compassion and love that just one look made you want to grow up and do only those things that would make her proud.

That loss is more than I can comfortably bear. I can search high and low in every toy catalogue, and never scratch the surface to come close to bringing what she could have brought into their lives. If maybe they knew her, then missing her would be more fun. We could easily say, “Remember that time when Grandma …”

So, I make these button dolls out of her buttons. I use pipe cleaners to twist the doll into shape, and then add the buttons, twisting the ends of the pipe cleaner at the end to hold the buttons in place. The flat ones make nice hats. Simply my way of leaving a little bit of Grandma around the house for the boys to see.

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