Granddaughters

It has been pretty busy for me but not with bad things. The best thing, though, was spending time with my granddaughter. I have three granddaughters. One of them is 23 and has graduated from college. She’s smart and pretty and easy to like. She’s fun and personable. She’ll be going to grad school in September of 2023. Until then she has various plans. She is leaving for Kenya on June 9th to work in a field school doing an archeological dig. She’ll be there until August. Of course, that makes me a nervous wreck. She has quite an intrepid spirit. She also wants to go to Guatemala to dig. She has been to Alaska and worked in a museum there. She also sailed a tall boat in the Pacific. She gets all these opportunities offered to her because she’s had good grades and has such an engaging personality. It seems like she wins almost every event she tries for. I love spending time with her. But she wasn’t the one I got to spend extra time with this weekend. I DO see a lot of her currently,however, because she’s been working part time in our law office, so I see her several times a week and it’s a delight! It’ll be tough for me when she’s gone to Africa.

My other two granddaughters are twin 14 year olds whom I homeschool on Wednesdays. I teach them literature, language arts and history. Wednesdays are truly the highlight of my week. I love them both and relate to each in a special way, but there are times when I just feel a real sparkle with one that transcends all of my other relationships. I guess that’s fate because her middle name is my first name and I got to pick in utero, which twin I wanted to have named after me (middle name). I picked her 😉

Anyway, this girl is an old lady’s dream because she’s a good listener and she loves to hear my stories… stories about when I was younger, about when her mom was younger, all sorts of stories. Yesterday, when the family came over to go swimming (we live in a condo with a swimming pool), I wasn’t in the mood to go swimming, so she decided to stay up at the condo with me because she said she really didn’t care about the swimming, she just wanted to hang out with me. You KNOW my heart was filling up with flowers hearing THAT! How many times does one hear from their grandkids—their TEENAGE grandkids—that they just wanna hangout with grandma. So we looked at photos and talked the whole time. I just love that girl. We have a lot in common. We both loves stupid stuff, like we both like to diagram sentences. It’s like doing a puzzle and we both find it fun. And we both like playing Minecraft, which she taught me. We have similar interests. Plus she’s smart and mature and can catch on to nuanced things, so it’s just really cool to have her as an audience and conversationalist.

Her sister is fun. She wants to write and is bursting with ideas but she is not quite as mature so it’s more like talking with a typical kid whereas talking with the one I spent time with is like talking to a rose in bloom as opposed to in bud. I think that was the highlight of my weekend… and SHE is turning out to be the highlight of my old age. She has been for a while. It has been a slow build up but my granddaughters are what is making me the happiest in my life and I certainly never expected that. At least they are making me the happiest in a close tie with my husband. I suppose HE is making me the absolute happiest, it’s just that they give me this joy that I didn’t even know existed.