Filed under: Life
Never seen them before.
Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.
(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)
Then I saw her brother.
Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.
The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!
The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!
Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.
When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.
I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.
We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.
They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.
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Nope, never seen one unraveled either. But little fingers can get into all kinds of things. Thank you for being the grandma to reassure the new family. It’s all a circle.
Comment by DebbieR 01.26.25 @ 11:42 pmLeave a comment
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