Story 3: Less of a Story, More of a List

And it's also my 800th post! (And Monday's my second blogaversary.)

We had a hugely attentive Grandma. After we would leave her house, she would avoid cleaning the bottom part of the living room mirror because she didn't want to wipe away our little handprints. She only had four grandchildren (and the fourth one -- our only cousin on that side of the family -- didn't come around until we were teenagers) and she liked it that way. She got a lot of time to play with each us. In fact, one of my last conversations with my grandma was about how she couldn't imagine having forty grandchildren, as Chris's grandma had. How would you ever find the time to spend with them all?

My Favourite Ways that Grandma Would Entertain Us Kids:

• Taking walks to the big rock that was in the yard of the nearby high school. That thing was huge when I was a kid, and we would climb all over it.
• Playing Junior Scrabble
• Playing the fishing game that she rigged up; she attached a magnet to a piece of string and we would use it to fish for paper fishes that had paper clips on their mouths. (She invented this game as an incentive for us to leave The Rock. If we went home, we could play a fishing game she invented!)
• Bowling in the basement with the plastic bowling pins she bought, using the secret baseball that she kept hidden in a toy babycarriage. (My grandfather was a very cautious man, and would not have liked the idea of us kids having such a hard baseball around.)
• Playing with the flannelgraph board that she would borrow from her friends every Christmas.
• Having slide shows (always the same ones: Dad and Auntie Darlene as kids; their trip to the United States to visit Grandpa's side of the family) and then making shadow puppets afterward.
• Treating me as a grown-up and letting me drink peppermint tea with honey in it when her sisters would come over for a visit.
• When we didn't eat our crusts, singing us a song about a child who hid his crusts under his plate and then the crusts grew all big and scolded him after he went to bed. We liked the song so much that my brother would purposely leave a bit of crust on his plate so that she'd sing the song. (She would alternately tell us how children in Korea would love to eat those crusts. In fact, they would pick them out of the garbage and eat them with relish! Somehow, that didn't help my appetite.)

Hm. This list seems like it could also be entitled "How Nerdy I Was, Even As A Tiny Child."