Our youngest son texted me a few weeks ago to tell me that his older daughter, who will be turning three in a couple of months, was randomly "reminiscing about Grammy helping her with 'small stuff.'" (She is a petite little thing and was an incredibly verbal child from a young age. She has an enormous vocabulary now, and she's very in tune with what grown-ups are saying; so she's a tiny person who often says big things.) Awww...that text just melted me, and it made me start reminiscing about their week with us in November, when they came from TN for Thanksgiving.
That adorable little girl loved being here--and she really loved playing in our basement. It's a bit of a kids' paradise down there, with ride-ons and building blocks and lots of vintage children's books and boy-friendly toys from when her daddy and his brothers were little, as well as lots of new (make that thrifted) items we've acquired over the years we've been in VA, such as a toy kitchen, dolls, dollhouses, etc. Every day we'd head down there and the first thing she wanted to do was to raid the dinosaur and animal bins to find all the smallest ones.
My little sweetie knew just where to look for the small stuff she wanted to play with, because Papa and I are insanely organized when it comes to putting things back where they belong after the grandkids have been wreaking havoc playing down there. I say "insanely" because we get teased about this by one of our darling daughters-in-law and her husband--my very own son, the traitor!--about how OCD-like we are when it comes to toy organization in our playroom. (They might have a point: we have separate storage areas for the "regular" dinosaurs and the much cooler Jurassic Park ones. Is that crazy?) But imagine if the small stuff was all mixed in willy-nilly with the cars and trucks, the blocks, the baby doll accessories, the Lion King toys...it would be mayhem, I tell you, utter mayhem! My little angel would have had to dump all eight bins in this storage unit every morning to find her favorite little animals and dinosaurs! Thanks to our much-mocked system, she only had to dump two! (One of these days, I'll treat you to a post all about our basement playroom and how organized it is. Stay tuned...or perhaps the better way to put it is be warned.)
So my little granddaughter and I would gather up all the small creatures and line them up and play with them, and that is how we spent many happy hours while she was staying with us that week. And then sometimes, all that playing would get too exhausting; once, she even crawled into my lap mid-play and crashed. I was, as her mommy and daddy call it, nap-trapped. And I was quite okay with that.
I miss that little peanut, and her baby sister. (Not to mention her parents.) It's hard for a mother not to have all of her chicks in the nest anymore, or at least to have the nest they're building with their own chicks a few trees over from hers. I have three of my five boys and their families living close enough to see regularly, though, and I count myself as very blessed, And thank goodness for FaceTime! Lately, whenever we FaceTime with this little girl, she reminds us, "I came to your house." Yes, she did. And I hope she comes here many, many more times in the years ahead.
We will be going to her house in a matter of weeks, and I can hardly wait. The fact that she was reminiscing about playing with the small stuff with her Grammy here a couple of months ago made me realize that she's getting old enough to remember things between visits; so I look forward to making some new memories with her there.
The small stuff, it's really the big stuff. But you know that, dear readers.
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