 |
| Michael |
A few really cold days, but this morning it was -15 C. and no wind, which seems almost like a summer day to Albertans.
Richard asked me what was new this morning as we walked in the dark, watching the sidewalks for places covered with ice.
What’s new for me is what happens when Richard brings Michael to my house for a play date with Grandma. I thought we would keep on our coats and hats -- go for a walk to and then a ride on the C-Train. That kid had his coat and boots whipped off and was telling me that we were playing at home. He was going to find his battery operated fire engine which he was sure is at my house. He looked in all of the rooms and found nothing. I am pretty sure that the fire engine is at his own house and that his mother has disabled the mechanical part of it for her own sanity.
Not being able to find it in my house, he played with other toys, staying our of my kitchen because he saw Derek in there who has grown a beard since Christmas. That beard was too frightening for Michael. He played with his toys down on the landing at the back stairs.
“Is he gone yet?” Michael called up to me.
“Yes. It is safe to enter the kitchen now,” I replied. “Derek’s breakfast is over. He is gone.”
And so we sat at the table having our snack – an apple and an orange. Michael wanted to re-cut the apple slices with the dull paring knife that I had been using to core the apple.
I sat and supervised. He practised cutting those slices into the smallest of pieces.
“I did it. I did it,” he would shout at each cut.
So? What is new at our house?
A lot of fun with the simplest of tasks.
Arta
awesome! love the cutting story. and how did you get snow to fall?!
ReplyDeleteGetting the snow to fall was easy. I did a cut and paste in a set of pics that goggle gave me. Some programme must slip in and pick a bunch of pictures and then show them to me when I hit a button. If I hit enough wrong buttons that programme will come up on my computer and I can just copy and paste it. An accident, really.
ReplyDeleteI want to tell about the orange that he ate as a snack as well. They are beautiful big ones this time of year, at least the ones at Costco. I took my paring knife, cut with it about 1/2 inch out from the stem and made a big circle through the skin at the top of the orange. Now there is a small "cap" that has been cut. Next I showed him how to get his little fingers under that cap and pull up, taking the top skin off of te orange. He was hugging the orange to his body, prying on the skin, rolling it back and forth, getting the aroma in his hands and the pith under his fingernails. He told me that oranges are yuck and he doesn't eat them, but he was holding this one, smelllng it, carressing it as I showed him how to do the same thing with the bottom of the orange, and then how to make parallel lines down the skin that is left and take it off.
When I was young, there was a saying, "Don't play in your food." Now if a child is challenged by a food, the experts tell us to see if we can get the food close to the child, let the child smell it, touch it ... introduce the food incrementally.
Of course I was having fun watching this little boy with an orange that he calls "yuck". There was juice on his hands and he experimented with the bottom cap of the orange as it was the hardest to get off and has that cluster of cells at the bottom that is hard to disengage from the flesh.
Yup.
Being a grandmother is a job I like.