My daughter Katie’s nanny is on vacation so I’ve been called out of retirement to keep an eye on Boopity Boop while she and Adam are at work. It’s been fun and I really enjoy hanging out with the pair of them all day long. Spending time with tiny kids on their own turf is a completely different experience than having them come visit you. On their own turf, surrounded by their own stuff, they’re relaxed, undistracted and way more fun, so I’ve really gotten to know BoopityBoop better in the last few days.
I knew they had very different personalities but having spent eight hours a day with them for over a week I can now say with confidence that while Boopity is a total sweetheart, Boop is a charming little nix-nux.
Despite what my sisters believe, ‘nix-nux’ is not a term I made up but a bit of Czechoslovakian slang, signifying a naughty little child. My Father-in-law used to call the grandkids nix nux when they misbehaved. A nix-nux is a mischievous but not malicious or mean kind of naughty. That would be a maruk.
Today, after breakfast, both girls were having their morning bottles. We were in the playroom together and Boopity just wanted to sit on my lap and cuddle but Boop thought it was hilarious to sprinkle her bottle all over my back. That’s a nix-nux.
We’ve been having so much fun together! Again: the Grandma trick is not to even try doing anything else when I’m with them. It’s not a sustainable model but it sure works in the short term.
I get there before they get up in the morning, so I give them breakfast and get them dressed then we play until they take their morning nap. While they sleep, I eat breakfast, check my email and read the news. Once, I even took a shower. Then they wake up, have lunch and we play all afternoon.
They eat everything now but it does need to be cut very small. They have lots of teeth but they’re not real good on how to use them. I usually start their meals with a squeeze bag of fruits and veggies. Feeding toddlers is so much easier now than it was when my kids were little! They love those easy to eat bags of pureed goodness. While the girls are slurping down apple banana spinach sauce, I chop up whatever else they’re having, like pasta salad or cooked carrots. They’re terrific eaters. I just keep throwing food at them until they stop eating it and start throwing it on the floor.
The dog loves lunch time, too.
The worst part about any meal is getting their faces and hands washed when it’s over. Wow, they hate that. They can’t talk but I know they understand me when I say it’s time to wash because they turn their faces away and when I say I’m gonna do their hands first, they try to hide them. It doesn’t work: I can always find their hands.
Afternoon is playtime, listening to music time and dance time. Sometimes it’s throw a million plastic balls around the room time or my favorite: read a book time.
I’m expected to fully participate in all times and I do. That’s why they love me.
I brought them with me to the shop last week. I had no choice: none of my go-tos were available to sit for an hour. They were all at my brother Joe’s house, helping get the place ship shape for the long awaited return of Woody and Heidi, who’ve been in Boston since mid-December, when Woody was diagnosed with leukemia. He’s responding beautifully to all treatements and they were finally cleared to come home! Yay!
A month ago, Margy and I took a weekend to do a little guerilla house decorating on Heidi’s behalf. She lives in a beautiful Victorian but is sick to death of the darkness of the house. She has wanted to repaint the sunroom for years but her stodgy husband got in the way. Margy and I had no trouble over ruling Joe’s objections and we painted her sun room. We also junked the dark wood blinds in the ten windows, which turned what should have been a sunlit oasis into a dark, dense forest of a study. Now, it’s a sun-kissed visit to the beach of a room! Even Joe agreed that it was a vast improvement on the previous look and that the rug and couch could not come back into the room but rather belong in the garbage. I didn’t write about it while we were doing it because we wanted to surprise Heidi. She was surprised and she loves it!
Anyway, as is usual in life, everything happens at once so I could not help with the final housecleaning. Can you imagine what a place looks like after four months with my brother in charge? No, you can not. In typical male fashion, he gutted and rebuilt the upstairs bathroom but neglected to dust or sweep the rest of the house for four months. The new upstairs bathroom looks fantastic! The rest of the house was covered in construction debris. Except the beautiful sunroom, to which we closed the French doors to keep out the dust.
Which is a very long way of explaining why I had to bring a pair of 15 month old babies to the shop with me.
It worked out okay; Boopity is a people person and was quite pleased to be out and about. Boop has a wide streak of Hubbell in her (introverts for whom solitary confinement sounds more like a reward than a punishment) and screamed at the idea that anyone but her Nana should hold her. She wouldn’t let me put her down for most of our visit. Fortunately, needlepoint and grandmothers have a huge overlap. I got all more orders taken care of.
Traveling with a toddler is hard work. Traveling with two is indescribable. We all needed a long nap when we got back to the house. Just getting them both in and out of the car takes all the energy I usually expend in a day. And you have to do it four times!
I didn’t run any of my usual Tuesday afternoon errands but I was still exhausted by the time I got the two of them down for a nap.
Wednesday, we stayed at home.
Thursday, we packed the car and took a fun road trip south to spend the day with their cousins.
Megan and Ty just had a wall built to separate their basement playroom from the storage/mechanical area. I had promised Megan I’d help paint it weeks ago. It had to be painted quickly because the carpenter (Ty’s cousin Jake) was putting a sliding barn door in place and he said to paint the wall first.
BoopityBoop love their cousins, Xena and Babalouie! The two little girls think the bigger kids are the coolest things in the world and the big kids enjoy their little fan club. They were more than willing to let the babies play with all their toys. We got the wall painted in no time and then just let the kids play. It was totally worth the drive.
As fun as it all was, it wiped me out. Every night I’d get home from Katie’s house with barely the energy to feed myself and crawl into bed. Jay was down in San Antonio for the Final Four during most of this time, so he wasn’t even there to cook me dinner. Fortunately, there were leftovers from all the delicious meals he’d made before he left, otherwise, I’d have had nothing but cereal while he was gone. Even if I liked to cook, I didn’t have the strength. I wanted to sleep right through the weekend but I had something to do.
Oh yeah; it was Easter.