When I was young, that kind of cute little girl young that is fun for adults to interact with, my mother would have me go and visit the retired neighbors that lived in the house behind us. To me, this wasn't a fun adventure, it was a duty I had to put up with, because my mother said it must be done and it wouldn't take long.
Even though the house was just behind our house, it faced another street and I had to go around fences and up a long hill with steps to get to their front door. They didn't go out much and they didn't play in the sand box or down at the creek and they weren't mommy or daddy to another child I played with so they had a sort of invisible existence up that hill behind the house to me.
I didn't want to go visit them because I wanted to play with other children. But mom insisted. And when I got there, they were always so friendly. They both smiled and we sat down, maybe they offered me a glass of water, or maybe we just talked. I know there was a lot of talking on their part.
They had a house that was full of this and that and things and they were all over the walls and the coffee tables and hanging from the windows and it was visually a very interesting house to visit. It smelled like "old people" to me, which I don't think is exactly fair, because given what I know today, that "old people" smell is really just a musty smell. But that's the first place I'd encountered it and today I still associate a musty house smell with the elderly.
We would talk about all kinds of things. They would show me their crystals catching the sun rays in the kitchen. They had delicate porcelain figurines they'd collected on one of their vacations many years ago. There was intricate lace and small wooden boxes and all sorts of things that looked interesting to a child of my age, but at the same time screamed, "breakable, you'll get in trouble if you touch that".
They would show me their things and we would talk about what was happening in my life and eventually, I would say I had to go and I'd go home. I don't know if they appreciated the visits my mother had me do over the years. Did I add a bit of variety to their day? Or was my mother trying to give me some experiences with people of all different ages? I don't know.
They died years later after I had grown out of that "cute little girl who visits elderly neighbors" age and another family moved in with a little girl named Micah. I will always remember those visits and the house full of a lifetime of memories.
The Big Boy Update: The rotating potty and the poop. My son had just finished his bath, when I told him it was his turn on the potty. At that point the phone rang and while I watched him and talked to the caller, I saw him sit forwards, get up, sit on the potty backwards, then he got up, turned the potty insert around backwards and sat back down. Nope, that didn't do it either, so he got up again and sat backwards on the potty with a turned around insert. A minute later he was sitting back in the normal, forward orientation on the potty when he said, "Momma, I pooped." Wait, what? I came over, still on the phone, and boy, did he go. I couldn't help but laugh and tell him how proud I was of him. The person on the other end laughed with me because I explained what he had done and that this was a new, development. Today, I left him again on the potty and a few minutes later he came out and said to daddy who had just gotten home, "Daddy, I poop."
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: She's been doing lots of things that just make you laugh at her cuteness lately. Stealing Daddy's big, heavy phone when he's not looking, holding it to her head and saying, "hi, hi, hi." Or turning around to see if anyone is looking when Mickey Mouse Clubhouse comes on and then grinning at you and dancing around and around to the theme song. Then there's the pacifier and how she likes to throw it out of the crib so she can say, "uh oh" and have an excuse to get out of the bed to get it when she's suppose to be sleeping. I also saw her get annoyed with the pacifier and throw it behind the bed, change her mind a minute later and then stick her arm deep, down behind the bed slats to find it and put it back into her mouth.
Someone Once Said: Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.
No comments:
Post a Comment