The Peanut Trap

Marshall is asleep in my bedroom. Adella is playing happily, singing Primary songs to herself and occasionally conversing with Blue Inga, her colorful, imaginary friend. I am taking advantage of this rare morning quiet time. I am busy on my computer preparing to advise an anxious parent about college admissions, a competitive sport in northern New Jersey. When I finally look up from my keyboard to assess what Adella is doing, I see a neat line of peanuts running the length of my family room rug.

Is Adella playing at Hansel and Gretel, I wonder. Surely she has not left the trail for fear she will get lost in my house.

She catches me staring. “I’m setting a trap for Marshall, Granma.” Then she carefully mounds a hill of peanuts at the end of the peanut trail.

“Who will clean all those peanuts up?” I ask.

She gives me a curious stare and laughs. “Silly Granma. Marshall will. He will eat them all up,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Of course,” I say, knowing full well Marshall could never eat that many peanuts.

And as I look at those peanuts, so deliberately laid, I think of Pearl Buck. Peanuts often remind me of Pearl Buck.  She mentions them in one of my favorite essays, “A Debt to Dickens.” In the essay, Buck describes her loneliness as a child of American missionary parents in China at the turn of the twentieth century who measures the enchantment of her first encounter with Dickens by her undisturbed pocketful of peanuts.

As I spy the open door to my pantry, the Adella's red stool pushed up against it, I think the essay particularly apt. Buck describes the hot August afternoon when the household is asleep and her parents preoccupied and she, a seven-year-old with no playmates, is left to her own devices. She pushes her “three cornered bamboo stool on top of a small table”  to get to “a long row of somber blue books on a very high shelf”--the Dickens, which have been put out of reach by her parents who looked askance at novels. On her way to the veranda to read Oliver Twist, she stops “in the pantry for a pocketful of peanuts.”  

This lazy morning, Adella too has a preoccupied caregiver and is without her playmate Marshall. She too has been left to her own devices, so she has stopped at my pantry and has used her red stool in pursuit of a snack, a 2 ½ lb tin of Kirkland Brand Virginia peanuts. Adella also is not without a literary sidekick. On the coffee table near her peanut trap, she has placed her cloth-bound, pocket-sized book, The Last of the the Mohicans. I know that she has pushed my grandmother’s chair up to my mother’s tall bookshelf in the bedroom upstairs in order to retrieve her favorite volume. I know this because this is part of our ritual. When she comes to my house, rather than choosing my childhood books Make Way for Ducklings or Madeline or some other classic picture book conveniently shelved on the lowest shelf, Adella pushes the chair to the bookshelf to retrieve this particular volume from the middle of a higher shelf. This book then accompanies her throughout her stay. And just as soon as she leaves to go home with her father, I reshelve the Mohicans next to the larger, red leather bound volumes of Kipling that Pop Pop inherited from Baba, his grandmother.

It is a peculiar yet endearing ritual, for Adella cannot read. This novel has no pictures. But it is compact, a pocket-sized book created in an era long before paperbacks. A book sized perfectly for a small child. I imagine she enjoys the feel of the cloth cover in her hands and running her fingers over the silver embossed title and turning its thick, yellowed pages. Maybe someday she will read it, I think. Maybe someday she will enjoy it as much as I did. Which is why I long ago stopped fretting about her destroying a treasured book with her great-grandfather’s name beautifully inscribed inside the front cover. Carrying that book, I hopes, will teach her to love books like her mother and father, and like me and Pop Pop, and generations of her grandmothers and grandfathers. I hope to instill a love of books in her, to lure her to worlds of treasure.

Oliver Twist so mesmerizes young Pearl that she quickly forgets her pocketful of peanuts, noticing they are untouched hours later when she is called to dinner. Adella, being four, quickly moves on from her book and her well-laid peanut trap to a game of Scrabble, which she induces me to play according to her rules. We find all the A for Adella tiles and place them on the board, then she draws pictures on the scoresheets, expecting me to guess what each scribble is. I am not particularly adept at guessing and she begins to suspect as much when I keep asking clarifying questions, such as “Is it a person?” or “Is it an animal?” or “Does it live inside a house or outside?” But soon, luckily, we are interrupted by the waking of Marshall, who happily joins us.

Adella delights that he does, in fact, fall for her trap. Well, sort of. He eats the peanuts, but he does not start at the beginning of the trail. Rather he begins with the mound at the end and then works his way toward the beginning. Until he stops midway. He gets distracted by the Scrabble tiles. Of course, none of this matters to Adella. Her only purpose in setting her trap is to get Marshall to eat some peanuts. Which he does.

I, unfortunately, have a family room with a line of peanuts. As I expected, Adella was a tad bit overconfident in predicting Marshall would eat them all. Once more, my house evidences my status as a granny nanny. As does my peanut tin. For when I later reach for a handful of peanuts to snack on as I read, I discover another Scrabble tile: A for Adella.

The Power of Suggestion

The call came early. I knew it must be urgent. No one ever calls before 8 o’clock in the morning unless it’s urgent.

It was Pop Pop. 

As soon as I heard his voice, I knew. “Let me guess,” I said, “You forgot your pump.”  

Yes, it was urgent, not life-threatening in the short term, but urgent nonetheless. Scott usually detaches his insulin pump for his morning shower. And Scott, being Scott, sometimes forgets to reattach it afterwards. The forgotten pump phone call, while not a frequent occurrence, was not exactly uncommon. It just had never happened on a morning when I had the grandchildren.

“Yes,” he replied, his tone sheepish with a generous oozing of I-will-really-owe-you-if-you-help-me-out-on-this-for-me.

“Soooo . . . ,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect. “I guess you want me to bring it to you,” hoping that by stating the obvious, it somehow would make it not true.

I looked at the kids. Adella was asleep on the couch. Marshall looked dazed and contented, on the brink of falling asleep.

“O.K., I’ll text you when I get there,“ I replied half-heartedly.  

My wedding vows had not included the phrase “in sickness and in health” nor the line about my “holding him” not just “for better,” but also for “for worse,” so I was technically in the clear if I wanted to grumble about this task. And grumble I did. I knew that in taking Scott's insulin pump to him, I was not just giving up an hour of my time, but an hour of potentially uninterrupted time--a treasure above all treasures when one is charged with watching young children. In fact, this morning was the first time all year the stars had aligned for both children to be asleep at the same time on my watch. Waking those children up to put them in the car was not a trivial sacrifice. But I reminded myself that thirty-four years ago I had vowed to love Scott forever, and perhaps this sacrifice was requisite.

I pulled on some sweatpants retrieved from the dirty clothes basket--urgent times require drastic measures--slipped on my shoes, grabbed the pump that was emphatically beeping for attention, pocketed my cell phone, strapped the dazed Marshall into his carseat, and finally carried a groggy Adella to my car. By the time I sat her in her booster seat, she was very much awake.

“You know, Granma,” Adella said as I was backing out of the driveway, “we could stop for donuts.”

I laughed. I was not in public-appropriate attire. I had no bra on. I was wearing my “mom sweatshirt,” a designation my son had given to my zip-up, hooded, baggy BYU sweatshirt. My sweatpants bore evidence of yesterday’s cooking, and although I had run a comb through it, my hair was definitely bed head, not hipster, runway bed head, but Granma bed head--one side smashed flat revealing the gray roots, the other side standing straight up.

“Why don’t we go through a drive thru somewhere?” I countered to no avail.

But Adella was only interested in donuts. So we set off for Pop Pop's work. Marshall promptly fell asleep in the car. Adella was quiet and content cuddling her blanket and sucking her thumb. And I kept hoping as I checked her status from the rear view mirror that she too would fall asleep.

A half an hour later, as soon as I had parked on the street near a door just outside his classroom, I texted Scott: I am here at the side of the building. Then we waited.

“I’m not sure why Pop Pop is taking so long,” I said to Adella after a few minutes. We really were just outside his classroom. Perhaps it was an inopportune moment to leave his students, I thought. I texted him a second time: Are you able to come?

“I have an idea, Grannma,” Adella cheerfully offered. “We could go get donuts and then come back. Then he would be here when we got back.”

Adella certainly was persistent. Her proposal for passing time while waiting sense made perfect sense to her four-year-old mind. Her parents must have used a similar tactic some other time. Yet it was clear she missed the nuances of that tactic as she assumed a casual link between getting donuts and ending a waiting time.

“Honey, I don’t think that will work,” I replied. “Pop Pop knows we are waiting for him right here. We need to stay here while we wait for him.”

So we waited some more. And some more. Finally I texted: What’s the situation?? I am not a person prone to textual dramatics, but I added the second question mark, nonetheless.

After a few more minutes of waiting, Adella offered, “Dunkin' Donuts is my favorite. They have sprinkles on their donuts.”

“Maybe your Daddy can take you for donuts. He knows just what you want,” I said.

“That’s o.k., Granma,” she replied, “I can show you.”

My patience was wearing thin. I briefly considered walking into the school and leaving the pump with security. But that required getting two children in and out of carseats. It also meant I would be seen, looking like a hobo, at my husband's workplace. So I called Scott. I had not wanted to disturb Scott in his classroom with a phone call. I know what it is like to be interrupted in a classroom. I also know that a ringing cell phone is perhaps the most disruptive and annoying sound a teacher faces, particularly when he has banned them. But I had waited long enough. I was beginning to really crave a donut. A chocolate one. Perhaps one with cream in the middle. He deserved to be interrupted.

“Oh, are you here?” he asked sweetly. I heard some giggles from his students in the background. “I'll be right there," he said, adding, "I thought you were going to text me." 

After hearing the tone of his voice, I tempered my impertinence, concluding he clearly had not received any of my texts. Either he or I needs a better data plan, I thought, one that delivers and receives texts promptly.

And soon Pop Pop was there, smiling at the kids, overjoyed to see them. I passed off the pump to him, and we began the return trip home.

“Granma, do you know where Dunkin' Donuts is?” Adella asked as we were pulling away from the school. She was not about to be denied.

“I don’t think we have time to go there, honey,” I replied. And we joined the throng of morning rush hour traffic on Route 24.

Later, as I neared the Morristown exits, I noticed Adella was on the verge of falling asleep again. I could drive straight home without incidence, I thought. But then I glanced at her, sweetly sucking her thumb. She had been aroused from sleep to get into my cold car without grumbling. She had cheerfully waited for Pop Pop to come for several minutes without complaint. And she had persistently made her wish for a donut known without whining. She was only four, but she had been far more patient than I.

So I took the first, not my usual second, Morristown exit. Adella deserved that donut. She had earned it. I am the Granma, after all, I thought. And what are grandmas for, but to reward their grandchildren for good behavior and spoil them a bit in the process. I pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, stopping right in front of its storefront. Adella, sensing the car had stopped, suddenly snapped to attention.

“There it is, Granma!" she exclaimed with great wonder. "There is Dunkin' Donut!" It was as if she had found the promised land. 

"You're so right," I said. We had made it.

And I walked into that Dunkin' Donuts in full Granma disheveled mode. I got in and out in under two minutes. No one gave me an odd look, perhaps because I had chosen the location near the train station, the one most frequented by the homeless. And Adella got her reward--a pink donut with sprinkles.

Then I drove home in a self-congratulatory mood, etching yet another notch in my belt of successful Granma moments. That is, until I saw Marshall, freshly awakened and energized after an-hour-and-a-half-long nap. He was merrily smearing chocolate icing and sprinkles all over his car seat and my car. (Adella had not told me he does not like sprinkles on his donuts.) As I looked at the new styling of my backseat, which conveniently coordinated with my Granma hobo look, I felt my Super-Granma smugness rapidly dissipating. 

At least I have that donut I craved, I thought. The one I had not even known I wanted when the day began.

Selfishly Stomping My Carbon Footprint

I have long since lost the ability to effectively plan how to get two small children to any event. Yet, today, despite numerous trips back to the house for forgotten toys and snacks and books and despite heavy traffic, I was very, very early to a play group planned by Aunt Justine at her church.

As our car approached the church, I took one look at the parking lot and saw that no one else had yet arrived. Marshall was asleep, so I did the only sensible thing--I kept driving. 

Five minutes later, Adella asked, "Are we there yet, Granma?"

"Soon," I replied, as I turned the car around. 

When I passed the parking lot a second time, there was still no one else there, so, once again, I sensibly kept driving. And I began to worry that the members of this play group would be late--on Mormon Standard Time, which is anywhere from ten to thirty minutes late.  We drove a full ten minutes in the other direction.

I saw in my rear view mirror that Adella's eyes were very heavy. 

"Are we there yet?" she asked again, adding, "I don't want to fall asleep or I will miss the music lady  and Jimbo."

"It's o.k. if you want to take a short nap," I suggested. "I promise I will wake you up when we get there." 

Of course, this promise came from a shifty grandma who kept assuring Adella we were almost there. I was reminded of all those evenings, years ago, just at dusk, when I used to strap her mother and her uncle into their car seats, duplicitously promising them we were heading to Lewis Morris Park to count the deer. I had not changed in nearly thirty years. I was still selfishly stomping my carbon footprint in a get-a-child-to-sleep-quick scheme.

In my defense, I was tired. My little grandbabies appear at my door at 6:30 in the morning and today I had found it a Herculean task to simply take a shower and dress myself with two little ones in tow, much less to feed and dress and get them out the door before 9 o'clock. I really was just hoping Adella would nod off, so I could take a quick nap in the parking lot before the other parents and children arrived.

But Adella was as determined to stay awake as I was to try and get a catnap. I decided to drive past the church once more.

"Granma," Adella said, "I've seen that school before. And that building too! Why are we going by it again?"

Busted.

I pulled into the parking lot of that building, the church. By then there was another car, another newcomer to the group who had arrived early. 

Fate, or rather an observant grandchild, kept me from my nap. At least the playgroup was a great success--Adella and Marshall were the first to arrive and the last to leave.

True Confessions on New Year's Day

As soon as Adella saw me today at church, she confessed. "I have your clock."

She does not need the clock. She has no conception of time--six o'clock is no different for her than midnight or noon, and she is just learning to comprehend the difference between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yet she finds the small clock irresistible, perhaps because she can hold it in her hands, watch the second hand rotate and hear it ticking the seconds away. The clock has a habit of migrating on the days when she visits. This was the first time it had emigrated from the house.

"You mean Pop pop's little red alarm clock?" I asked.

Scott had asked me last night if I knew where it was. Normally one does not need to worry about an alarm clock on New Year's Eve, but we did have to be at church at nine o'clock on New Year's Day.

"Yes." Exuberantly she added, "I brought it back to give to you. It's in my car."

"I am so happy," I replied, adding, "because Grandpa really needs his alarm clock." That was an understatement. Scott is a creature of habit, especially when it comes to his sleep habits. He does not like to vary his sleep routine, and having his little red alarm clock by his bed is a critical part of that routine.

So I thought I would enlist her help. "Adella," I said, "Pop pop's clock is very, very special to him. Do you think we could find some place to put that clock so it does not get lost, some place where it would not get moved?"

She thought a moment. "I know," she replied. "We could put it in Granma's room next to her bed, so Jimbo won't get it."

Scott and I could hardly contain our laughter. It was not her cousin Jim that we were worried about. He does not have sticky fingers. My question, which I had hoped would instill a little self-regulation in Adella, clearly had missed the mark.

Oh, what an appropriate reminder for me on New Year's Day, a day of reflection and resolution. Like me, Adella has no hesitancy confessing her faults. Unfortunately, also like me, she has no hesitancy shifting the blame for her shortcomings to others. Unlike me, she is only four years old. Here's hoping I will put several decades of life experience to good use and finally make some progress on my New Year's resolutions.

Adella's Stash

In my basement, Adella found a folded up rolling file box from my teaching days. I showed her how to open it up and position the bottom to make it a fully functional box with wheels. Big mistake. Too late did I realize I was clearly enabling her, for my dear, sweet four-year-old granddaughter has a a touch of kleptomania mixed with a bit of hoarding disorder. (Perhaps the same impulse that compels children to fill their pockets with rocks.)

Adella has a habit of going through the rooms of my house "lifting" things and placing them in her latest collection receptacle--bag, backpack, basket, and now file box. This habit is not unlike that of her mother who stole Barbie clothes on play dates, Tic Tacs from Bradlees, and a rubber stamp from Treasure Island. (I do not think the bankruptcies of either establishment is directly related to Chrissy's petty crimes.) The increased carrying capacity of her new box allows Adella not only to greatly expand her growing collection, but to also cart her goods much more efficiently throughout the house.

There is no rhyme or reason to Adella's pilfering, as is evidenced by this most recent inventory of the box:

 

• Novel Sea-Wolf by Jack London (not one of my favorites--leftover from a naturalism class in graduate school) 
• Miniature copy of The Declaration of Independence
• The Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card 
• The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me by Roald Dahl  
• Pink Floyd, Pulse CD 
• Mozart CD 
• Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas CD 
• A recorder (musical, not mechanical)
• Random USB cord 
• Star Craft Strategy Guide 
• A Hewlett Packard printer ink cartridge, unused
• 3- 3 1/2 inch floppy drive disks 
• Vintage plastic Pokemon wallet 
• This year's new Christmas ornament from my visit to James Madison's home Montpelier 
• Barbie picture frame (from a Happy Meal 20-25 years ago)

And this is just today's haul. 

As I consider the stash, I conclude Adella clearly must be planning for her future. She does not yet know how to read, nor can she operate a CD player--should she be able to find one in the house and add it to her box. Nonetheless, she will be prepared for the day when her abilities allow her to fully access the treasures hidden in her collection. Although I suspect by the time she learns to read or she finds a CD player, she will no longer be interested, for much of her eclectic collecting style is most undoubtedly related to the fact she finds an object with reasonably compelling cover art that she can add to her collection without being detected. 

I am still not sure how to explain her attraction to the printer cartridge and the floppy drive disks. But someday I will tell her what the disks were used for in the "old days."

I should put her haul away. But I am not actually sure just where she found everything, and she would only collect it again anyway. For now we will let her stash be. I take heart in the fact that Chrissy, her mother, in her pursuit of happiness, clearly overcame her kleptomania and has become an outstanding, contributing member of society. 

Up and Down

I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. Adella and Marshall were eating a roving breakfast. Each had started breakfast with a cup-size bowl of Rice Chex (No milk, please—Adella does not like soggy cereal) at the kitchen table, but soon Adella, bowl in hand, had migrated to the family room and Marshall was ambling around the kitchen with his bowl. Then suddenly my Spidey-sense kicked in. Marshall was quiet. Too quiet.

Now Marshall is an unusually contented toddler. As his grandmother, however, I recognize that his happy-to-be-alive worldview is nonetheless tempered with an ounce of stealth. I immediately looked up from my dishes to see him huddled over the decorative heat register in the floor near the kitchen table. I rushed over to find him intently pushing his Rice Chex, one by one, through the varying rectangles and squares of the Art Deco register.

Quickly I assessed the situation. Thankfully, for some unknown reason, the register was closed (as it shall stay until Marshall outgrows this stage) and the crumbs were accumulating on the plane created by the closed vents underneath the cover. So I let him continue, and I watched. He was not playing an analytical game seeking to match the square pieces of the cereal to the square grate openings as I would have expected. Rather he was engaged in a trial-and-error effort, pushing, shoving and crumbling the different cereal pillows through all of the holes, an effort requiring more toddler brawn than brain. He delighted in watching the crumbs drop through the holes, and he continued dispatching the Chex until there was none left, stood up and moved on to the toy corner in the family room

And as I looked at the cereal dust, I was left to contemplate. I obviously had not given much thought to that heat register since purchasing it a few years back, or I would have opened it to allow the heat to take the edge off the morning chill of the late fall crispness that morning. I was more focused on the items in my adult field of vision—the cluttered counter, the dirty dishes, the unopened mail. I certainly never could have imagined how attractive a heat register in my kitchen floor would be to Marshall.

There must be something about being almost two and a half feet tall, nearly half my size, I conclude. Living life closer to the ground offers him a perspective of the world far different from mine. He sees things I do not see, finds things I cannot find. A few mini tootsie pops a few days earlier further proved this. Marshall brought me a cherry one for me to open for him. I was puzzled. I had no idea where he had found the sucker. I considered it a random anomaly until he brought me a grape one a little while later after he had finished the cherry one. I was perplexed. Was he privy to some secret Halloween cache of Adella’s hidden under the family room couch or behind the dining room curtains? Or had Pop Pop carelessly spilled a few in the mudroom when preparing a reward for a student? Certainly if I had not been so busy (or tired or lazy or old), I would have gotten down on all fours and discovered the source of his treasure. But I did not. I never saw what Marshall (and his cousin Jim, who found an orange tootsie pop the next day) saw.

As I considered Marshall's fascination with the grate, I remembered a similar incident with Nathan on a bright, September morn twenty-five years ago in upstate New York. I was trying to hurry Nathan, a toddler, along the pathway as we returned from the top of a hill to the parking lot. But Nathan was oblivious to my pleas. I looked back at him, squatting down, looking intently at the pathway. I would have appreciated the juxtaposition of my squatting son against the backdrop of the golden statue of the Angel Moroni pointing heavenward had I not been in such a hurry.

Naturally, I assumed Nathan’s squatting stance signaled a poopy diaper in progress, so I rushed back to pick him up. But when I reached down to pick him up, I saw what he saw: a frog so small only one so close to the ground would have seen it. So I stopped. And together we studied that frog and its tiny toes and bulging, shiny eyes. We looked at its glossy skin and noted its camouflaging colors and marveled at the intricacy of the patterns on its back. And then we delighted at the trajectory of its hops as it escaped to the grass. All this we saw when we looked down together.

And as I think of Marshall and Nathan, I contemplate the chaos and busyness of my life. Modern life is often lived looking up. Look forward and stand up straight, our schoolteachers direct us as we march single-file down our school halls. Things will look up, our mothers console us after our first failed romances. And our religious leaders entreat us to look up toward the heavens for the strength to face life’s challenges. And all this is very good. But sometimes there is value in looking down. While it is true that we see the broad sweep of God’s grandeur when we look up, we also see the delicate strokes of God’s finger in the intricate complexities of the minute when we look down. This I learned from my son and a frog in a place where my religious tradition tells me both the heavens and the earth revealed the wonders and mysteries of God.

It happened again. I caught Marshall fascinated with yet another heat register. But this time it was not a decorative grate, but a boring one with simple, straight, narrow openings. It was not Rice Chex, but a gingerbread man, and this time I had to stop him because I knew the register was open, not closed. My rescue was a bit too late for the gingerbread man—he will not live another day to taunt “Catch me if you can.” Just in time, I pulled out pieces of the gingerbread man’s arms and legs before they slid down the heating vent. And I sighed. I appreciate Marshall’s fascination with dropping things down. I just hope he outgrows this fascination soon enough to save my heating system.  

Let Them Eat Cake

I suppose I took far too long going to the bathroom, as only one who cares for a preschooler and toddler is wont to do. During that time, Adella went through the mudroom door to the garage, rummaged through the large freezer there, found the remains of her pumpkin-shaped ice cream birthday cake from her party the night before, put the cake on the kitchen table, and was searching for spoons and plates.

“Granma,” she says, “I want some birthday cake for breakfast.”

So I do my grandparent calculations.

Is it harmful? No, not unless you consider a possible brain freeze a hazard.

Would her mother allow it? Probably not. Although, I think, she is my daughter.

Will Adella tell her mother? Undoubtedly. A four-year-old does not yet comprehend the concept that what happens at grandma’s house should stay at grandma’s house.

Will my saying “yes” create future unrealistic expectations? Probably not. Her birthday only comes once a year. I can clearly justify saying “No” if she asks again for such a breakfast next week.

“Sure,” I say.

So we three merrily eat the rest of her pumpkin shaped ice cream birthday cake. At least it’s a dairy product, I rationalize. And it tastes good.

I enjoy the sweet smooth ice cream almost as much as I enjoy the moment. After all, what are grandmothers for if not for unexpected indulgences?