It has been busy around here since Christmas Day. We brought the grandchildren home with us for a visit. C is 14 and K is 12. A handsome young man and a beautiful young lady.
We spent the time together playing pool, watching movies, baking cookies, hauling firewood, shoveling snow, building a snowman, shooting a sling shot, filling potholes in with gravel, filling holes up with dirt and gravel, shopping at Wal-Mart and Tractor Supply, eating breakfast at Waffle House and Sunny Street Cafe, and supper at Steak and Shake, visiting the wife at work, eating meals together around the dining room table, playing with Buddy, and laughing at my hearing problem. It has been a lot of fun, most of it at my expense. That’s all right, somebody has to be the fall-guy.
It has been a joy to watch them grow over the past 12 and fourteen years. The change in maturity and growth from one visit to another is always a “Wow! You have grown another two inches!”
I am very proud of C and K for their values as young people. Dad and Mom have done a great job instilling good habits into their lives. They are polite and respectful always helping out with whatever needs done around the house and yard. They will go far with their gentle confident personalities.
I have 80% hearing loss in my left ear and 40% loss in my right ear. Hearing aids don’t help with the nerve damage issue. I have trouble hearing the beginning of certain words, and while I am trying to figure out what word was said, another four or five sentences has been spoken, and I have missed some of those words as well. It is stressful for an old man.
C and K had fun asking me questions and laughing at my answers that had nothing to do with their questions. Somehow I thought that C has asked me something about washing his dirty underwear, and I answered, “You want me to wash your dirty underwear?!” (He was asking where the toilet plunger was) So, that became my standard answer to every question that I couldn’t understand. Lots of laughs for several days.
Buddy barked at C and K for the first day or so, and continued to bark at K for her whole visit. K spends a lot of time on her I-Pod while wearing a hat or towel wrapped around her head. Buddy couldn’t remember whether he knew her or not, or whether she was some kind of alien come to take him away, so he would bark at her for a while and then he would play with her for a while and then bark at her and play with her, well you get the picture. I think it would take a couple more weeks of seeing her each day before he ‘got-it’.
C is becoming quite a ‘pool-shark’. He made some amazing shots, many of them ‘slop-shots’, but also some real skillful ones! I used to think that I was ‘King of slop-shots’, but I do believe that I have to pass the crown onto my grandson. We laughed a lot around the pool table, and sometimes had to move quickly to get out-of-the-way when the ‘cue-ball’ went flying out of control. I remember C didn’t quite move fast enough at least once. He was walking normal again last night, so I think there is still hope for great-grandchildren.
Then somehow around the dinner table we got onto the subject of old people in nursing homes. In sharing about the aging process, I made some comment about starting out as babies and ending up as babies. This led to ‘depends’ and how nursing home staff had to change diapers and bathe old people, which in turn led to how our bodies age with different parts losing their normal functions. Taste, smell, hearing, sight, touch, muscle tone, everything atrophies, getting us ready for our second, and sometimes third childhood, before putting us into our last crib. Quite a dinner topic?
We take them to meet their parents today, so there will be a little less laughter around here without them. Not that J and I don’t laugh, she is always laughing at me, not because she finds me funny either.
Thanks C and K for making your grandpas week! It has been great fun….
Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation. Unknown..