Chin Up!

I was lying in bed with Judge Judy on mute ( which, I discovered, is actually the best way to watch that show), listening to DJ Sammy ( dreaming about my Heaven with my family) and trying to decide what to write about today. Then it hit me, right in the throat it got me. I'm talking literally. Everything was going just perfect until my body decided to offer a volunteer full body spasm. My computer stand was set up a bit low and so when my carefully placed and manicured fat belly hit the computer stand, off slid the laptop and landed square on my throat. So now, if you can picture this, Judge Judy on mute and me with a computer pinning me down to the bed by my throat! As you can see, I just don't let a small thing like that put me on mute. Take that Judge Judy.

Being in a position like that got me to thinking ( it doesn't take much!) I am reminded of something Taylor lovingly calls "chokers". The other day she woke up and told her mother that she didn't sleep so well. When her mother asked why, she clearly stated, "the chokers kept waking me up." That being a new word for her mother used in that context, she was curious what Taylor was talking about. So she asked  incredibly probing secondary question to Taylor's remark, "So, what did you do?" To which Taylor gave her reply that obviously shows how incredibly smart she is, "I blew them on my sheet." The clarification wasn't so clarified to Bree so she hurried off to Taylor's room to check out these chokers that she had blown away.

I'm going to leave you hanging for just a second. I too have my problems with chokers and I too blow them a way. Where they land is not really up to me and they have chosen many delightful places to land. Okay, you guessed it! Chokers are those ugly yet fascinating little green blobs ( that really is the technical term -- I checked it on Wikipedia) that get bigger and bigger until you can't breathe through your nose and you have to do something with them. Taylor correctly identified how to dispose of them so she could go back to sleep. Blow them on your sheet! Now, if she would have been oh, say, six or 12 months younger, she may have also explained to her mom that she not only blew them away, but that she couldn't stand to see them wasted on the sheet and she got hungry. And the end of chokers!

I'm still pinned down here with my computer, waiting for someone to rescue me. I'm okay and all, I've been in worse situations that's for sure. Oh! And the above reminded me of something that probably only my children have experienced because no other father would play such a trick or have such a distorted sense of humor. Anyway, I loved to cook breakfast for our family on Saturday mornings. I owed as much to their beautiful blue-eyed brunette mother who cooked breakfast every other morning of the week and stayed out late with me on Friday night's. My breakfast of choice was a big pot of oatmeal. Not just any oatmeal, but my "special" oatmeal. It included vanilla, walnuts, cinnamon, brown sugar and my "secret" ingredient. I'm willing to offer up my secret ingredient today because I have a pretty good suspicion that I won't be making any special oatmeal in the near future. Here's the secret ingredient: five drops of green food coloring. And there you've got it --delicious oatmeal that looks like fresh chokers. You'd think that no one would ever eat it right. Well, I convinced them one by one and if you ask them today, they will tell you that was their favorite meal that I ever made ( of coarse, it was the only one I ever made!)

Well, Taylor, I can tell you from experience that chokers have kept me up many nights and nothing feels better than falling asleep after blowing away a choker!

Off to the Park Taylor and I Go

I don't get out as often as some other grandfathers do. But, I have one granddaughter, Taylor, who would like to spend all of her time outside if she could. So on a recent visit here, she was begging everyoneand anyone she could find to go to the park with her. After a few minutes of this, I spoke up and told her that I would like to go with her to the park. She gave me a look like, "Are you sure you're old enough to go to the park?" I was so glad when her mom encouraged Taylor to go with me. Taylor was still dressed in her pajamas, a well-worn Cinderella dress. But, that was very comfortable for her so we took off out the door.
Taylor is such a pleasure to go with outside. She tends to believe that she is responsible for me so she tells me where to go and how to act most of the time, which is fine with me, my wife has been doing that for many years. The park is about two blocks from our house which is just perfect. I let her lead me along. It was a bit windy and the wind had been blowing all night. We spent lots of time looking for dandelions that had turned into wishing lions. When we got tired of that, we looked for other flowers and we saw some beautiful roses. It is a feeling almost beyond description to see her reach out with her little girl fingers and gently cupped her hands around a rose. That's what I call a reverence. She found a rock or two that struck her as pretty and I got to carry them in my lap.

Along the way, there was a broken down riding lawnmower that was positioned after way into the sidewalk. At first, it was fascinating to Taylor. But then, she saw that the way that the lawnmower was positioned made it difficult for me to get my wheelchair by. Then she seemed to show a bit of frustration when she asked me, "why would they just leave their lawnmower right there when it's in your way?" She seemed relieved when I told her that it was okay, I could get around.

Next along the way, was crossing from one corner to the next. Fortunately, we had arrived at the end of the morning shift for our local crossing guard. A crossing guard was a new experience for Taylor. She beat me to the corner and walked around in nervous circles not really knowing what to do. When I got to the corner, I explained to her what a crossing guard was and why they were in important, as well as how we were to proceed. She walked right next to my wheelchair as a crossing guard helped us go by. Once we had completed the crossing, I said thank you and Taylor quickly followed suit with her own thank you which gave the crossing guard a chuckle. Walking along the sidewalk for the next half of a block, several other children used the crossing guard. I was so happy when each and every one of them said thank you to the crossing guard. And each time that they said thank you, Taylor said to me, "that boy/girl said thank you just like I did."
As soon as we arrived at the corner of the playground, Taylor took off for the area where they have the playground toys. I followed and was delighted at her behaviors. There was another little girl, younger than Taylor, who was already playing there. She was accompanied by her mother and the family dog. Now Taylor has developed a "concern" about dogs, so when she had to go around the dog, who desperately wanted to play with her, she took a wide arc. It was all for the best anyway since judging by the incessant scratching, the dog obviously had more fleas than hair
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Taylor lost no time in developing a friend. She quickly asked her her name and remembered it often in their small girl play world. The other girl was a bit more comfortable, being local, with the playground equipment and monetary gift Taylor at tour. But, Taylor would have none of that and explored on her own careful to stay away from most slides, which I think she is a bit uncomfortable with. Soon, they both went off to the swings. The other little girl needed help from her mother to climb into the swing and needed her mother's help to push her. Not Taylor though! The swings are something that she is very familiar with and has been for a while now. Her little friend was amazed that Taylor knew how to "pump" her legs to keep her swing going. I moved to the other side of the park to get a better view of the swings and to rest in the sunlight.

After 15 minutes or so of swinging, Taylor made her way over to me and asked, "do you think of my mother is still at your house?" I said that I didn't know and that probably we should go check. The walk home was rather uneventful, without a crossing guard. The lawnmower was still there though, it's always there! But this time, Taylor just kind of said to me in a matter-of-fact way, "that guy left his lawnmower in your way."

After we got home, Taylor had a couple of bites of something and then she quickly asked, "Gimpa, would you like to go to the park again?" Fortunately, her mother had another idea of what she wanted her to do. I would have gladly gone with her again, but it took me a two-hour nap to recover from the morning! I know that other grandfathers do activities with their grandchildren that are much more "exciting", like going to Disneyland or boating or fishing, things like that, but I am filled with as much joy and and content to find "excitement" in the simple things of life.

How to Use The Word 'Lederhosen' In a Blog

The moment that you are about to gain some critical information about a member of your family feels electric. It's something like being in the middle of a seventh-grade dance floor with a disco ball directly above your head and you learn the name of that beautiful girl that keeps walking right by on her way to dance with someone else. You now have the name of the next love of your life!

That's exactly the way I felt last night when I learned that I had an internationally ranked clogger as a son-in-law! Here's how the whole thing happened:

I was busily engaged in watching my grand daughter Maxine go through a routine of her twirling. I'm fascinated by this, as you might imagine. She's quite good, in fact when I teach her how to start chanting poems as she twirls, I think she will give Rumi a whirl for his money. Apparently though, completely unbeknownst to me, my son, her father has other plans for her. He mentioned something about how she might take some lessons from my one, and only so far, son-in-law. ( This is where the electricity begins to flow.) I'm deep in thought about what the suggestion has to do with Sufism when I hear my son say that my son-in-law is in the internationally ranked blogger. "An internationally ranked blogger?" I'm thinking, and I did this out loud for some senile reason, "I didn't even know Eric had a blog and how did he get internationally ranked? I can even get four people to read my blog?" My wife gave me a look as if I had completely gotten the whole concept wrong and she pulled her chair closer to my ear and she repeated, "No, he said clogger, not blogger, with 'c', not a 'b'!"

Now, the disco ball is spinning out of control. I get a flash of a picture: my daughter, in her beautiful white wedding gown standing next to a man with a green hat, multi-colored shirt, and green lederhosen!

So, apparently the gent is, or was at least, an internationally ranked clogger who traveled over to the very country where they invented the dance. How could I have missed such an important fact like that in my pre-son-in-law interview? You'd think, being Irish and all myself, that I would have included a question about clogging in my interview. I asked him about blogging after all. Now, the electricity is losing its voltage. I must to make room for this new information and figure out how I'm going to apologize to my daughter for missing that important information before the wedding.

I'm not saying that I regret that he slipped by me on the interview. Actually, it's probably a good thing that I didn't ask that question because he's my number one son in law and I think the world of him and more importantly, my daughter loves him lederhosen and all.

Sidebar Question: there's a rumor floating around that you actually would have won the international clogging quartet competition except you split one of your cloggers all the way to the toe and you have forgotten your backup pair. Is that true?

I think it's time to start updating my pre-son-in-law interview because my next letter is obsessed about marrying somebody with the last name "Lutensliemer". I bet he probably has his last name in white letters on the back of his lederhosen.

Just Another Lazy Saturday

Lying still in bed thinking is one thing, but lying in bed watching football is completely another. On the one hand, you are still doing, but on the other hand you just lay there waiting for somebody else to do something. I realize it's entertaining, football I mean, but of what value is football entertainment? I'll admit that I've had a few entertaining moments from football. But, they usually come when there's 2 seconds left on the clock and the losing coach gets drenched in Gatorade by the players that have spent the whole game hovering around the wet fan and don't even realize what the score is. Time runs out. Now that's entertaining. So here I wait, still, guys run up the field, fumble, and the other guys ran down the field and end up throwing an interception. This goes on for somewhere around two hours while I wait, still, for the last 2 seconds and the Gatorade dump. I think the last one I saw was in the seventh grade!

To set the record straight, I love football. But, I've never really been a good sports fan. I don't listen to sports talk radio, and when I was younger I could only sit through a few minutes of any sport before I had to go outside and throw some ball, any ball up in the air as high as I could. I can hardly imagine me spending an afternoon watching sports unless there was a blizzard outside were Evil Knievel was jumping 20 smashed Buick station wagon's. It always made me nervous that they were Buicks because that was the model we drove. It also seemed a bit odd to me that they were all smashed, didn't Evil believe in himself?

So, here I lie, still. I could probably use some entertainment if I would have done anything this week. Entertainment is for the people that work hard all week and need a break. That's not me. I've been in this bed all week long. I'm not complaining or anything. Three good meals with plenty of yummy medication for dessert. I have any show that I want to watch at my fingertips, if I could only get up and get the remote. Now, how lazy is that? I pretend like I'm doing something on the screen, but I really just have a comic book up where no one can see it. That's how my days roll, scheduled nap in the morning, interesting lunch because I get to interact with someone, Bonanza, scheduled nap in the afternoon, Gilligan's Island, unscheduled nap in the evening, interesting dinner because I get to be fed by my beautiful, blue eyed, brunette wife, scheduled quick nap, then into prime time -- which I'm usually too tired to watch.

But, there is one relief and I watch and pray for it every day. Around the corner of my bedroom door will come a beautiful pregnant lady carrying a small package. She puts her downand she toddles three or four steps in my direction. She stops dead in her tracks, her eyes glistening, she gives me the little gimp wave. She knows that's how I wave so that's how she waves to me. I could watch her for hours and not feel the least bit lazy. She amuses me and he entertains me. Not this evening though, she has a cold and she's tired. She probably missed her nap today watching football games with her parents. Sweet Maxine toddles off to her evenings rest and so do I. both of us awaiting the Healers.

Soon she will get a tricycle. I think I'm going to keep a lookout for smashed Buick station wagon's!

The Art of Distraction

The child control tactic of distraction should be one of the sharpest tools that we grandfathers carry around on our tool belts. It's one of the first parenting concepts that we learn: Child A, a three-year-old, notices that her sibling, Child B, an 18-month-old, has picked up Child A's only toy on the face of the earth. So, Child A races over and body slams Child B tearing away the toy. Of course, Child B retaliates with a sharp scream and so the fight begins. We check our tool belt and "distraction" stands ready for use. We whistle our way over to the ring, pick up another flashy toy on our way, and offer that to Child B. She is quickly distracted and happy to play with this new toy. Note: you get extra points if you make Child A feel like it was her idea. And on it goes, 30 to 40 times a day until they move out of your house. That's how come we know how to do this so well. Mimi and I discovered recently though that our children learn this control tactic as well when they are quite young, even before three.

Our oldest granddaughter is quite the artist. She started with crayons when she was in her crib -- only it wasn't crayons and I will be the rich and smelly source of another blog. In preparation for our granddaughter's maturity to the point that she knew better than using the wall as a coloring book, we had stored away some crayons in a drawer that we pretty much figured a tiny fingers couldn't reach. As a seasoned grandparent, you might be able to discover the numerous mistakes which were made in the last sentence. First of all, level of maturity has nothing to do with what is chosen to be a coloring book and second of all, nothing is out of reach once they are two.

We let her mom could take a much-needed nap ( another grand parenting mistake many newbies make). We played with our granddaughter for a little while and then left her "for a quick minute" so we could go cuddle up ( oh how I wish! Voice-recognition error! Should be "huddle up") to discuss upcoming dinner plans or something on that level. Mimi was only gone a couple of minutes at the most and then returned to check on our granddaughter. I was a bit slower, and lagged behind back in the bedroom. When Mimi got to her little angel, she had climbed on this, so that she could climb on that, so that she could step on this, so that she could open the drawer with crayons. How did she know they were there? Could she smell them? At her mother blown our secret -- something she's very good at by the way? Crayons were dumped and a counter stool was scooted over by the refrigerator where she had carefully chosen Mimi's handcrafted calendar as her coloring book. The following is a narration of their conversation which I was later able to get from our liable source:

Mimi: "Taylor, what are you doing?"
Taylor, without even flinching, drops her crayon, look squarely at Mimi: "Mimi, go see Gimpa!"
Mimi: "Why, Taylor, why should I go see Gimpa?"
Taylor, without a break: "Because, he's a REALLY NICE GUY!!"

This level of advanced distraction from the mouth of the two-year-old. I didn't even learn the principle until I was in my 30s. Not accounting for how much it took her to get the crayon or the stool or the calendar, but she deftly and seamlessly applied the rule of distraction. On one level, she tried to distract her Mimi from even seeing what beautiful coloring had already occurred and, on an even deeper level, she appealed to her Mimi's love of being with Gimpa. She's fortunate that she tried it on her Mimi, because I would have fallen for it without ever seeing the underlying activity. But not her Mimi! Just as quickly her Mimi replied the following:

"Why of course he is! How would you like to color with some gummy bears instead of that yucky old crayon?"

Coloring gig over! Mimi gets points for applying the principle of distraction artistically and at a level that only Yoda could understand. Taylor gets extra points because she agreed to never use such advanced tactics on our own parents. I got left in the bedroom because it was discovered, don't ask me how, that I was the one that disclosed the secret hiding place.

Conference!

 Today is the Monday after conference. It should be declared a holiday for all parents who have children under five and tried to take in conference! If you’ve never experienced this, it’s hard to relate. I remember those years, every fiber of our being was spent on corralling our children and trying to get them to remember one thing from conference.

Of course, leading into conference, we adults have all prepared quite diligently and made promises to ourselves that we would listen to every speaker and gain “something” out of conference. The Bishop’s wife suggested that we decide upon a question we have and we will be surprised about how many answers we receive during conference. What we forgot is that toddlers trump conference!

Okay, I can bet that there are countless grandfathers out there who have some good ideas about how to interact with your grandchildren so that their parents can watch conference in peace and hopefully learn something that you didn’t teach them. I’ll also bet they have to prepare ahead of time and make sure they are well hydrated and have had plenty of sleep. These kind of grandfathers do things like set up games where the grandchildren are matching faces on TV with faces carefully cut out of the Ensign. Or perhaps they give out pieces of candy corn to the listeners who identify certain words. Special candy for whomever can stay the quietest for the longest. Yes, these are all great ideas and I’m sure you can share hundreds more.

Here’s how I get through conference at the speed of gimpa. First, I set a reasonable goal. This year, my goal was that none of my grandchildren would be brought home by the local police because they had “escaped” and I had forgotten about them. So, I got myself a current set of pictures of our grandchildrenI and and worked on their names. I also had deadbolts and stair gates installed. I chose a room, our bedroom since I was confined to bed to take care of my pressure sores. The advantage of our bedroom was that it was relatively small and didn’t have many escape routes. I dumped out a bunch of crayons, papers, picture books, bugs ( the plastic ones of course), dolls, zillions of hair ties, and everyone’s favorite blanket. No guns. I learned that lesson last time. Turned on the TV to conference at a very low volume.

Here’s a hint on how to make it through eight hours of perpetual emotion: redefine reverence. It’s time to give up our tired and old definition. Reverence no longer includes “the act of being quiet”, nor is there room for “sitting quietly and listening”. Save those definitions for primary. Here’s my definition: watching my grandchildren in such a way that I come to spiritually understand the greatness of my Heavenly Father. He is their Heavenly Father as well. The Kingdom of Heaven is likened unto one of my little ones and I am here to learn.

I am happy to announce in this very blog that I reached my goal! No policeman visited my door, we all survived, I learned a bit from my grandchildren and I can’t wait for the conference issue of the Ensign!