Turn Around Is Fair Play

Adella begged me to get out my Easter bunnies. A little early, but it did not take much for Adella to persuade me, especially when she is here to help. Half the fun is seeing her and Marshall's excitement.

So Adella and Marshall played with the bunnies, arranged them throughout the house, and had an Easter egg hunt. (Somehow Adella, who hid them the eggs, found most of them.) After Adella neatly arranged all the Beanie Babies bunnies on the stairs, Marshall came along and pushed them all down. She was not very happy. 

"Marshall," she scolded. "It took me a long time to put these bunnies up."

I laughed. Turn around is fair play. For the past three years, it has been she who has pushed those bunnies down. In fact, she is the one who has taught him to push the bunnies (and the Halloween cats, spiders and ghosts, and the Christmas bears) off the stairs. Usually it is the first thing they do when they come to Granma's house.

Maybe this year, someone will help me put the bunnies back.

A Perfect Storm

It was a perfect storm. It was late Sunday afternoon after dinner. Four sated adults talking to each other, not quite attentive to the conditions brewing upstairs. 

It was a pair of adult scissors, too easily accessible in a corner of Granma’s kitchen. A five-year-old itching to practice her recent mastery. 

It was a second floor landing above an open staircase in the front hall at Granma’s house. A two-and-a-half-year-old fascinated by testing the limits of gravity. 

It was a recently filled basket of snack-size bags of Goldfish crackers and Nilla Wafers. The five-year-old so irresistibly drawn to the slippery, thin texture of the shiny, puffy snack bags that after practicing her cutting skills to open a bag for her brother, she furtively carried all the rest of the bags upstairs where she neatly cut the tops off each of them. (Hey, at least she didn’t cut her brother’s hair, like her mother once did.) 

All these factors combined for a perfect storm of goldfish and cookies raining down up Granma’s stairs yesterday. 

Given the reactions of the parents, the chances of such a storm occurring more than once are rare. Although cleaning up the the storm's aftermath with the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner seemed more like a game than a consequence to the children. 

Granma thinks she is going to wait a few weeks for the weather to clear before she restocks her snack basket. 

A Matter of Life and Death

Grandparents are supposed to be warm and fuzzy. Usually I am. I let Marshall, who relishes skin-to-skin contact, rub my skin whenever he is tired. I allow Jim just a few jumps on my family room furniture whenever he is excited. (Perhaps I can justify replacing my twenty-year-old, now-that-the-kids-are-grown couch with a new now-the-grandchildren-are-grown model. ) And I hand Adella the Roku remote a bit too often. But when it comes to discipline. Well, . . . let’s just say, I frequently deflect to my children, their parents. They can play bad cop to my good cop.

But sometimes, sainted as we grandparents are, we get frustrated. And when we are frustrated, we say words we regret. Today was such a day. The minute I said them, I knew I should not have. And despite wishing all day that I had not said them, I could not take my words back.

The morning began with a text from Pop Pop. He had forgotten his insulin pump again. Now it might seem unusual for someone whose life depends upon such a device to simply forget to attach it after his morning shower. But Pop Pop, who has had the weight of the world on his shoulders lately, did not slept well last night and he just simply forgot to reattach it. So he was dependent upon me, his angel of mercy, to deliver his insulin pump to him. 

When I got Pop Pop’s text, the kids were still in their pajamas. And very rambunctious. I knew it would be a herculean effort to get the kids dressed and out the door this morning. I warned Scott that my pump run might take a little longer than usual.

“Adella and Marshall,” I announced to the children, “Pop Pop forgot his pump. We’ve got to get dressed and take it to him.”

“But I don’t want to. It takes too long,” Adella whined. She clearly remembered the long ride the last time we took Pop Pop his pump. “Why do we have to take it to him?”

“Because he cannot leave work,” I replied. “And this pump is very important to him. We must get dressed.”

“I’m not going with you,” she protested.

I let her be for a few moments. I knew I might need to circle around the issue a few times to achieve my goal of getting all three of us dressed and out the door. So I went to my bedroom and threw on some clothes, some regular clothes. The last time I took Scott his pump, I looked like a hobo. Today, I was determined to look a little more presentable. Besides I figured if I got the kids in the car, we might as well also stop at library for story time afterwards.

Dressed, I came back to the family room. I reminded Adella again. She responded by stripping and running to the bathroom. 

After her potty break, she danced back to the family room, a few pirouettes followed by several slides down the smooth hardwood floors as she gleefully sang, “I’m naked. I’m naked.” On any other day, I might have admired the freedom of her nakedness and the joy of her song. But today I needed her dressed.

“I need you dressed,” I repeated, amping up the seriousness of my voice.

She promptly pulled on three different pairs of panties and declared, “Look at me. I’m dressed.”

At least that’s progress, I thought, and went to work on Marshall. I changed his poopy diaper and dressed him. 

Adella was down to one pair of panties by the time I finished with Marshall. But then she began dancing a taunting dance, one intended to egg me into chasing and grabbing her. I did not give chase. At five, she is too old to chase. And at my age, I am far too old to chase her.

“Pop Pop really needs our help,” I repeated. 

Then I lowered my voice register and increased my volume to serious Granma mode, a tone I rarely use, a stage akin to DEFCON 3, so rarely used that it usually shocks my grandchildren scurrying into action. “Please get dressed, NOW.” 

“I don't want to,” Adella pouted, deaf to my histrionics.

“But if we don’t take the pump to Pop Pop right now, he will get sick. He needs his insulin,” I said.

“But why?” she replied loudly and defiantly. “Why? Why do we have to go to his work? Why can’t he come home? WHY?”

Enough was enough. I snapped. 

“Why?” I said. “Because Pop Pop will die without his insulin.”

I regretted saying the D-word immediately. But I knew what had been said could not be unsaid and that given Adella’s memory, I might be writing checks for therapy in twenty years. It was unfair of me to place the burdens of life and death on a five-year-old. Furthermore, it was a conversation reserved for parents, not grandparents.

I reflected on my conversations with my own children about death. Because of cancer and heart disease, my parents had begun walking a tightrope between life and death five years before my children were even born. I had talked openly and frankly about death with them from the time they were young. Of course, sometimes my conversations were misconstrued by their young minds, as when Nathan, about the same age as Adella now is, began telling anyone who cared to ask that his grandfather ate too much ice cream and then died. But my children at some level understood death as a part of life.

And now I had circumvented an opportunity for my daughter to have a discussion with her own daughter. True, they had discussed death with Adella two months ago when Great-Grandpop Wake had passed away, but his death had seemed more remote. He was much older and lived many miles away. Her greatest concern was that Great Grandpop’s memorial service conflicted with her best friend’s Bruce’s birthday party, a dance party, no less. Pop Pop, on the other hand, was a part of Adella’s daily life. I had unwisely upgraded an urgent situation into a matter of life and death. Oh, how I wished that I had framed the urgency of the situation in terms of life, not death, like my daughter who, when her impish son steals her pump while she showers, reminds him that she needs her insulin pump to live.

Nonetheless, my regrettable words did inspire immediate action. Soon Adella was dressed, and we were all strapped in my car. 

“Hurry up, Granma,” Adella, she who had dawdled, urged as I started the car. “You need to drive fast. We don’t want Pop Pop to die.”

Granma did not speed, at least no more than usual, but we made it to the high school in record time. Once I was parked, I texted Pop Pop, then called. Three times. But he was busy doing what teachers do--teaching. 

“Scott, Scott, Adella’s here,” Adella yelled from the backseat each time she heard his voice mail greeting over the bluetooth car speaker.

And indeed she was. Ready to save the day by delivering his pump. I was less fervent, just hoping Scott would see my texts or listen to my messages, for I did not want to unbuckle the carseats, zip coats, and shuffle my two little charges into the high school.

We sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting. Marshall expectantly squirmed in his seat. 

"Well," Adella said after a while and then paused. It was clear she had been thinking and was ready to make a pronouncement. 

“I’ll miss Pop Pop if he dies,” she said as matter-of-factly as if she were commenting on the state of the weather or what she had eaten for lunch at school.

And then I knew. I would not need to write any checks for therapy after all. Adella was not nearly as traumatized as I by my warnings of Pop Pop's death. 

Eventually, we got out of the car, rushed through the winter cold to the school, and were buzzed into the building. Soon four little feet were on tiptoes and four little hands grasped at the edge of the security guard’s tall desk. Only two little eyes peered over the desk at the very congenial security guard, for despite his best efforts, Marshall could not quite see over the top. He grunted as he tried to pull himself up.

“We have Scott’s insulin pump,” Adella announced proudly as she tried to reach over the desk to pass the pump to the guard.

“Why don’t you give it to him yourself?” the guard suggested, and then paged Scott. 

In a few minutes, Pop Pop was walking down the center of a very long, empty school hall. 

“Look, there’s Pop Pop,” I said and the children ran off down the hall to him, Adella holding the pump aloft.

Pop Pop saw them and grinned widely. Then as they neared him, he stopped and squatted down. Adella jumped into his arms. Marshall, just happy to be out of the car and running down the hall like a typical two-year-old, missed his mark and ran right past Pop Pop. Agile beyond his years, Pop Pop leaned back and scooped him up. 

Then the bell rang. And as students erupted from the classrooms and spewed into the halls, Pop Pop embraced Adella and Marshall, shielding them from the noisy swirl of students and backpacks and adolescent angst. He looked at me, smiling, basking in this brief moment of everyday ordinariness. Fully alive. At least for today. 

Part of That World

“Have you checked out Adella’s hideout lately?” Pop Pop asks in the quiet of the early morning. We are recovering from the day before, a long and busy Sunday with the kids.

Adella has adopted the bottom of an upstairs closet as her official hiding place. No doubt she discovered that I had reorganized the narrow, tall, linen closet on the second floor while playing hide n’ seek. The space once occupied by several of Uncle Daniel’s boxes is now vacant. Practically an invitation for Adella to move right in.

Now there is enough space underneath the bottom shelf for both five-year-old Adella and two-and-a-half-year-old Marshall to comfortably play and hide. An ideal hiding spot for hide n’ seek. An even better one for a clubhouse. Less crowded than the coat closet and a floor with fewer pokey wire hangers than the floor of our clothes closets. 

“I found my alarm clock up there. That closet hideout looks a bit like the cavern where Ariel keeps all her dinglehoppers.”

Pop Pop is particular: he has spent years finding his perfect alarm clock--a 2-inch square, battery-operated, analog clock with illuminated numbers and an alarm that cannot be ignored. Pop Pop is frustrated that his perfect alarm clock migrates throughout the house. Its small size, easily grasped by small hands, and its ticking second hand are particularly attractive to all three grandchildren. 

I go upstairs. Is my linen closet really filled with gadgets and gizmos aplenty? It’s not that I do not believe Pop Pop. It’s just that he frequently exaggerates. 

I open the door. I look down. 

A comfy bed pillow, an accent pillow, my faux Pashima scarf, a tiny red teddy bear with green antlers, a sock monkey, and a handful of animal crackers. Hardly what I would consider whosits and whatsits galore.

And then I look up.

On the lowest shelf amidst the pillow shams and sheets for single beds, there is an empty, gray, clamshell eyeglasses case, a dictation tape recorder, a handheld cassette recorder, a 4 X 6 picture frame, and Pop Pop’s red alarm clock. The second lowest shelf, just out of Marshall’s reach, is more heavily laden: an empty Game Gear carrying case, a Fisher-Price pocket camera, a set of plastic baby keys, a white plastic skull key chain, a black folding Radio Shack travel alarm clock, a silver souvenir state bell with Utah on the handle, my Japanese word book--a small spiral flip notepad filled with neatly copied vocabulary words from my days in a Japanese immersion school in 1980, a Quidditch manual, a pocket-sized copy of Suess-isms: Wise and Witty Prescriptions for Living from the Good Doctor, a 1996 Chromium Gold Beetleborg Metallix Medallion, a wooden top, a broken wallet-sized calculator, a functioning scientific calculator, a clear container with a golf ball and Mr. Potato head ear and nose, and a pink plastic sand bucket with a broken yellow handle containing ten unsharpened snowflake pencils, a folded brush, two pieces of a broken Rubix Cube, and 2002 holiday teddy mini Beanie Baby. Could she have reached the next highest shelf, no doubt, Adella would have decorated those shelves as well.

All Adella’s thingamabobs are neatly arranged. Pop Pop is right: Adella’s treasure trove does indeed resemble Ariel’s. Not in sheer volume, but in its randomness. It is a motley collection of items for which she has no use. Even the pencils, with which she could draw, are unsharpened. She does not know the purposes or functions of most of her treasures untold. She has collected these items simply because the colors, shapes and sizes of each appeal to her sensibilities. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe she knows something I do not and is stockpiling these items for very particular uses in a coming zombie apocalypse.

I look at this collection, and I laugh. Delightedly, at her sheer chutzpah--appropriating Pop Pop’s and my things without a second thought. But also nervously, for I hope I am not witnessing the early stages of kleptomania. After all, her mother Chrissy had very sticky fingers at this same age, stealing a Barbie bridal veil on a playdate, Tic Tacs from discount store Bradlees and a rubber stamp from the craft store Treasure Island.  Worse yet, I wonder if Adella’s collecting is not the first step towards her becoming a star on the reality series Hoarders. Perhaps an intervention is in order. Regardless, I hope she tells no one how much time she spends shut in her grandmother’s closet. I do not want the Department of Child and Family Services to open up a case file on me. 

By Monday afternoon, Adella and Marshall are back playing at my house once more. Adella emerges from the closet after Round One of  “Dinosaurs”--our little game in which I am a dinosaur (T-Rex, I think) chasing my prey, two hapless, screaming children, through the house. Their hideout saved them from my ravenous appetite.

“Hey, Granma,” Adella says. “Who took my clock?” She has clearly noticed the one missing item in her trove.

“You mean the red one?” I say. “It’s Pop Pop’s. He took it because he needs it.” 

Pop Pop has wisely put his reclaimed little red alarm clock on top of our high dresser. It is safe for now. At least until Adella pushes a chair up to the dresser to restake her claim to it.

“I need it," she says. "How will I know what time it is?” 

I do not point out that there is a second alarm clock, digital no less, on the second shelf. Instead, I say, “One problem at a time, my dear. We’ll handle that problem when you know how to tell time.”

A Factor of Two

I am adjusting to a new granny nanny schedule. My son-in-law’s teaching schedule has changed. No more preschool run on my nanny days for five-year-old Adella. I now have have both Adella and Marshall all morning long. It’s not that I haven’t nannied the two little cherubs together for hours before; I have watched them both since birth. But I have not watched them together since Marshall, now two-and-a-half, has become an entity to be reckoned with. He no longer naps. He adamantly says “no.” He now is a maelstrom. 

And now Adella wants to make cookies today. Two days ago, she asked me. She remembers the days we used to bake cookies while Marshall napped. I made my excuses. I was hesitant to undertake such adventure with Marshall added into the equation--making cookies means managing two helpers, not one. But I love to bake. Adella loves to bake. Maybe Marshall will learn to love to bake. And I do want both of them to have memories of baking with Granma. So I wonder if today is the day.

Our morning has begun calmly. Marshall sits snugly in my lap as we eat oatmeal together. Adella, wanting to practice her newly acquired pouring skills, successfully pours just enough milk from the nearly empty milk jug into our bowl without spilling a drop and then settles into eating her yogurt. Breakfast is usually scattershot. All three of us sitting quietly, pleasantly eating breakfast together. Surely this is a sign to proceed.

So we do. After breakfast, I go to the kitchen counter. I begin assembling the ingredients, the measuring cups and spoons. Marshall sensing some action, immediately pushes the red stool next to me. Adella follows, and soon they are jockeying for position on the stool as they spoon sugar into two different cups.

“Marshall’s not giving me any room on the stool,” Adella complains.

“Go get the other stool,” I say. “It’s in the mudroom.” 

I am unruffled. This is precisely why I have two stools. And two of many other things in my house. Such as the two vintage Littlest Pet Shop carrying cases, which once belonged to her mother and uncle, currently sitting on my hearth beneath a menagerie of pets.

I pour the cup of granulated sugar measured by Adella into my mixing bowl. I add a little more sugar to Marshall’s cup to make it a level cup and add it to the bowl too.

As I try to help Adella measure the brown sugar, Marshall begins carefully removing the granulated sugar from the mixing bowl, spoonful by spoonful, back to his measuring cup. For her part, Adella is more interested in picking out the lumps and sucking on them than pressing the moist brown sugar into her cup. 

“Look, Marshall. This tastes good,” she says. 

He looks. I no longer have a problem with the granulated sugar gradually diminishing from my mixing bowl. Instead brown sugar is now sprinkled all over the counter, the stools, and the floor. 

No matter, I think. I quickly remeasure the granulated sugar, add the cup of brown sugar, push the mixing bowl beyond the children’s reach, and add two sticks of shortening. Yes, shortening, not butter, all thanks to Mrs. Green’s recipe from my seventh grade home economics class in the early ‘70s. It is true that despite its claims on the label the shortening has traces of that dietary evil trans fat. But these cookies taste so good, I rationalize, and even Cookie Monster now knows cookies are a “sometime food.” So, I start the mixer a’creamin’ and reach into the fridge for the eggs.

“Eggs,” Marshall says excitedly when he sees the carton. 

Marshall manages to grab an egg before I can stop him. I manage to turn off the mixer before he smashes the egg into the mixture. He grabs for another. I stop him with one hand, put three more eggs aside for Adella far from Marshall’s reach with my other hand, return the eggs to the fridge, and then begin fishing out all the eggshells, which I throw into the sink. 

Marshall stares at the viscous, gooey egg white dripping from his hand and then looks at me. I dodge his hand before he can wipe his on me and grab him.

“Adella, switch places with Marshall,” I say. 

She scoots over, more than happy to move to the prime real estate. She sets about cracking the remaining three eggs, which I have to move yet again out of Marshall’s reach. I set Marshall down in front of the sink and turn on the faucet so he can wash his hands. He is delighted. He loves water play. He presses the switch, changing the water stream to a spray. 

“Uh-oh,” Adella says. 

I look. Her fourth egg has missed the bowl entirely. It is gradually spreading across the counter, melting some of the scattered brown sugar in its path. I throw her a paper towel and turn my back for just a second to grab another egg from the fridge. 

“Granma,” Adella yells, “it’s a river.”

And indeed it is. Marshall has pulled down the faucet head and stretched its hose over to the countertop. It is not a river, but a flood, dotted with floating bogs of brown sugar, flowing quickly over the edge of the counter as a waterfall, cascading down the cupboards to the floor. 

“No, Marshall, no,” I say, grabbing the faucet from him. I turn the water off.

I run to get several towels. By the time I return, Marshall has somehow managed to turn the faucet back on. Not sure how. His arms are not that long. (Perhaps Adella wanted to continue the fun?) Regardless, what was once a river on my kitchen counter is now a lake on my kitchen floor. A great lake.

I wade through the lake, lift both children over it, move the stools, and wipe up the floor. It’s a three-towel lake. I strip Marshall to his diaper and then I very quickly finish mixing the dough, throwing in the vanilla, the dry ingredients, and two packages of chocolate chips, one semisweet, the other bittersweet. Finally I move the bowl and the cookie sheet over to the kitchen island. 

Soon the stools are also pushed up next to me and four little hands and two little spoons are competing with me for cookie dough. I drop neat little mounds onto the cookie sheet. Adella heartily samples the dough, sans chips, she has neatly captured onto her spoon. Marshall, his hands thankfully very clean, reaches in and carefully cherry-picks out piece after piece of chocolate. Me? Well, I do sneak a large bittersweet dark chocolate chip here and there, all the while hoping that after forty-five years of sampling cookie dough, today, of all days, will not be the day we are felled by salmonella. (Note to self: reduce granny nanny guilt by buying pasteurized eggs before baking with the grandkids again.)  

By the time the first batch of cookies is out of the oven, Adella and Marshall, their sweet tooths sated, have scampered into my bedroom. I tidy a few things, knowing full well that every moment I tidy in the kitchen is counterbalanced by a moment of chaos in my bedroom. So after the second batch is in the oven, I check on the children. Amidst several pairs of shoes scattered around the room, I find Adella prancing around in my heels. Marshall performs a sort of veil dance, a twirling whirlwind, dancing in circles as he throws Swiffer sweeping cloths in the air with each turn. 

“Oh, my,” I say.

“I am wearing Granma’s shoes,” Adella sings. “I love to wear Granma’s shoes.”

I grab the Swiffer box from Marshall, gather the cloths from around the room and stuff them back into the box and begin collecting the shoes. 

Then the timer dings.

I scoot my cherubs from my room, shut the door behind me, and rush to the oven.

I remove the cookie tray from the oven and begin transferring the warm cookies to the wire cooling rack on the counter. Soon Marshall is next to me, matching me cookie for cookie. Each time I lift a warm cookie from the cookie sheet, he picks one of the cooled cookies from the first batch and places it on the cookie sheet. By the time the cooling rack is full of warm cookies, my cookie sheet tray is full of cooled cookies. 

“Wanna cookie?” I ask, baiting him so I can switch the cookies. Marshall begins eating the warm cookie I offer him, and I surreptitiously slide the cooled cookies back to the counter and begin scooping more dough. 

“Schlurp, schlurp,” Marshall slurps--his equivalent of a three-star Michelin rating. 

I look at Marshall. I am surprised. In a matter of seconds, he has managed to smear his face and chest with the warm, melted chocolate. He looks like a Navy SEAL wearing camouflage. 

“You, my dear, need a bath,” I say.

“I’ll give him a bath,” Adella immediately volunteers, exuding the confidence of a five-year-old, first-born child.

“No! no! no!” I say. “You can’t give him a bath alone. You need an adult to supervise.”

My hands are dirty, and I am still scooping out the third batch. I hear little feet scurrying up the stairs and know I should follow, but I am so close to finishing. Then there is silence, and finally the sound of running water in the bathtub upstairs. I shove the cookie sheet in the oven and rush upstairs. 

When I get to the bathroom, Marshall is stripped of his diaper, sitting in the tub, surrounded by a flotilla of grounded toy boats. He splashes in the water rushing in and out of the tub, for Adella has not yet learned how to close the bathtub drain stopper in Granma’s tub. I sit down next to the tub, adjust the water so that it is at least warm, close the stopper, and watch Marshall, who is soon joined by Adella, enjoy his bath.

I also enjoy their bath. It is a welcome respite. Adella and Marshall are contained. They are entertained, playing with the bath toys their mother once enjoyed. They are happy. I am happy. I settle in. I am thinking, this bath can go on indefinitely.

And then the timer dings. 

“Curses,” I think. “Why did I put that batch in?” 

And then I quickly begin calculating probabilities. How likely is a fire from burned cookies? How likely is Marshall to slip and drown in the bath? How likely is Adella to save Marshall should he fall? Do I doom my grandchildren to death by fire and smoke inhalation or death by drowning? In the end, I conclude the chances are miniscule and that I am a hypocrite.  I make a mad dash downstairs, pull the cookies out, turn the oven off, and run back upstairs before my grandchildren are even aware I have left the bathroom, knowing full well that I would eviscerate any other adult who left a child alone in the bath for even an instant.

But all is well. And just as I am beginning to recover my mental equilibrium, the regatta has finished, and the children are dried and dressed and running back downstairs. I do not even stop to tidy the room before following them. I simply grab the wet towels and follow them downstairs.

By the time I am downstairs, Marshall is on the stool at the kitchen counter. His clean shirt smeared in chocolate. I wonder if I can get the chocolate out of white stripes of this brand new shirt without his mother noticing. I remove his shirt. 

I look at the clock. It is 10:30. I know their father will pick up Adella and Marshall  in the next hour. I have survived four hours. For four hours I have kept my grandchildren happy without the help of a single electronic device. No cell phone, no tablet, no computer.  No T.V., no DVD, no DVR, not even PBS. Granted, I have exposed them to trans fats, salmonella, drowning and smoke inhalation. But they are happy. Their young, impressionable minds are free. And, despite the hazards in my home, they are alive. Time to throw in the towel.

“Let’s watch Netflix,” I declare.

Knowing she who controls the remote controls the viewing content, Adella quickly and adeptly finds Barbie Life in the Dream House before Marshall can demand Toy Story Toons. I put another clean shirt on Marshall, who is a bit too mesmerized by the screen. Then I  relax into a chair. I look down. I notice a cookie, with just one small bite taken from it, under the edge of the coffee table. Then I notice another similarly sampled cookie under a family room chair a few feet away, a third under the kitchen table a few more feet further, and a fourth under the kitchen island. I do not know when Marshall snuck these cookies, why he has taken just one bite out of each, nor why he has created this peculiar trail of abandoned cookies. (Note to self: find Hansel and Gretel to read to Marshall.) 

“Hmm,”  I say. 

I stare at the trail and try to imagine the thought process of this rogue two-and-a-half-year-old.

And then, as I consider Marshall and Adella and our frenetic morning together, the half-empty bowl of unbaked cookie dough, the clothes and towels to be laundered, and the mess in my kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, I come to a very important realization. There is a reason my second child Nathan went off to college without the ability to cook. I chalk it up to the factor of two. Two children, that is. For when two children, one of whom is just two, are factored into the cooking equation in my kitchen, the probability of chaos increases exponentially.