Grandparent care duty

This past weekend Kathy and I did child care duty in Adel while the grandchildren’s parents, Dave and Erin, were in Colorado celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary.

On second thought, that’s not accurate. The grandkids did grandparent care duty.

Will, Norah, and Colin are 16, 12, and 9 respectively. They’re pretty much self-starters, and have no problem taking care of themselves. And us too, while they’re at it.

The TVs in their home have significantly more apps than ours. As you might suspect, that’s a problem for us. If there’s something we want to watch, we don’t know how to get there. But any of the three of them negotiates the remote control maze with ease, including Colin.

Whichever one happens to be in the room with us at the time pushes the remote’s buttons with lightning speed, as though it were a video game controller (which we also don’t mess with), and Zing!, what we wanted jumps to life on the screen.

If they’re not around we can eventually get there, but by then several minutes of the desired program are gone, and we’re not adept at the thingy that lets you go back to the start of the program you want.

I know a little about stuff like American colonial history, authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the presidential election of 1876, and the kids politely listen when I bring up one of those, but somehow that material doesn’t seem to grab their undivided attention. However, they know fun facts about American history, world geography, etc., and they enjoy sharing those with us.

On Saturday we drove back to Greene County with the two younger kids to decorate family graves at Jefferson Cemetery and Pleasant Hill Cemetery. The kids were intrigued by ancestral facts and the ages of their forebears — the Pleasant Hill gravestones are for my paternal great-grandparents, their great-great-great-grandparents. They seemed impressed by the birth and death dates on the stones, and the marker that shows the old 1850-1866 stagecoach trail between Des Moines and Sioux City.

We took Norah to a bookstore to celebrate her birthday a few weeks ago, and one of the selections she picked out was “Would You Rather?” As in, would you rather lick a stranger’s toenail or lick a friend’s earwax? She loves asking us such heavy questions from the book, and it’s hard to know how to answer.

Norah knows some card tricks, too, and from time to time she brings the deck over and asks me to “pick a card, any card,” I do so, put it back in the deck, and she magically pulls it out. It’s always the one I picked out. I’m trying to figure it out, but haven’t done so yet. I’ll keep trying.

Colin’s thing is reading. He usually has his nose in a book, generally a science fiction fantasy or a history or geography treatise. In the car he will suddenly recite some esoteric factoid that he’s learned. How much he knows is sort of scary.

Will has his first paying job outside the home this summer, which he started over the weekend: lifeguarding at the Adel pool. He’s pulling seven-hour tours of duty, for which he earns an impressive wage (at least compared to what I earned at his age, 67 years ago). He had to preface his stints by taking many hours of training, including earning lifeguard certification. Sunburn plagued him at first, but he’s now using plenty of sunscreen and getting by just fine.

The Adel brood has a dog and two cats. One of the cats sneaks circular elastic hair ties into the dog’s food and water dishes several times a day, and no one sees her do it. Her purpose is unknown to any of us, but I suspect it’s just because she wants to tease the dog.

As I write this column on Sunday, we’ve found 22 hair ties in the past few days, some of them in the dishes and some under the sun room couch. We should probably set up an observation post at which we each take a turn to catch her in the act, but that likely won’t happen. We’ll just keep extracting them from the food and water bowls and trying to dry them out.

The dog and cats seem to have arrived at a mutual accommodation of live and let live. There’s an occasional confrontation, but it doesn’t last longer than a few seconds and is promptly forgotten by the participants. At least so it appears.

The cats, being cats, are sort of standoffish, especially De. Chloe is a little more social, but not much. But the dog — Milo — is wonderfully friendly. He’s exuberantly glad to see us when we arrive, when we stand up, when we sit down, and when we’re eating. Especially when we’re eating. I made the mistake early on of gracing him with tidbits of whatever meal I’m having, and he now waits patiently and eternally by my chair when it’s dinnertime, staring at me with his large expectant eyes. I always give in, and the cycle continues.

On Sunday (today, as I write this), the two younger kids joined Kathy and me on the miniature golf links. It had been years and years since we last played miniature golf, and it showed. But it was plenty of fun despite some embarrassing putts.

Dave and Erin will fly back to Des Moines International Airport (I love that title) late Monday evening, and we’ll probably drive home when they get back to Adel, although if the plane is late we may stay another night. I will have a meeting to cover at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, so it would be easier if we were in Jefferson Monday night. But no matter what the schedule requires, we’ll meet it, and be game whenever Adel duty requires it.

The kids need to stay in practice.

Rick Morain is a reporter and columnist with the Jefferson Herald.