Another Day to Remember

January 11th is my dad's birthday, but rather than write another maudlin post like I did about my mother, I have decided to celebrate by writing about his great-grandboys, of whom he would be very proud.

Yesterday was a day with the "grandboys", Lucas and Ian. Colleen was off to work at 8:15 and Eric had left much earlier with some other football coaches for a one day football clinic. Mike had arranged to be at their house by the time Colleen left and had gathered the ingredients to take over for making the boys' breakfast, which was sandwiches made with bagels, ham, eggs and cheese. I understand they went over well. (Sounds yummy; here at home I had my usual boring oatmeal.)

Ian was up and ready to go when Mike got there. He's is a bit like the energizer bunny and gets up earlier than Lucas, who loves to sleep in on the weekends. Lucas has a 5:30 wakeup time a couple days a week when he goes to school with some buddies to lift weights and do other conditioning exercises for football, so he gets pretty tired. Growing in height as well as musculature takes a lot of energy. Just being 13-1/2 takes a lot of energy, if I remember correctly.

Mike brought them to our house around 12:30, where I was taking the last batch of French pastries out of the oven. It was a first try for this recipe, which was labor intensive (in spite of what the reviews said!), but they were delicious and a fine treat for all of us. The boys balanced out the sugar a little bit with a bowl of red grapes, their favorite fruit as far as I know. Lucas also had a diet drink which led to some creative belching.

As usual, Ian headed directly to my computer. He knows my password and is familiar with several game websites, so he was settled in early on. Ian seems to be particularly fond of the fight-wound-kill variety of games with lots of clashing noises and grunting. I assume he knows the difference between reality and the other worlds he enjoys in these games. Occasionally I hear him laughing over a particularly spectacular kill, which is disconcerting.

Lucas and I sat at the dining room table and talked about any number of things including school and sports and friends, shared some stories and laughed a lot. He recounted the funniest parts of the movie "Home Alone", and insisted he had seen it only once. He's had that amazing memory from the beginning; at the age of four he could recite whole pages of information about dinosaurs, word for word. Scary.

Eric got home from his clinic and called around 3:00, so Mike rounded up the boys and took them home. They took a bag of pastries to share and Lucas said, "Just make sure we save one for Mom." (only one?) Suddenly the house was very quiet, and I was very tired. Those boys had gone home to be with two parents who love them very much, after having spent the day with two grandparents who also love them very much. Some day they will realize how special those relationships are. I sure do love those guys.

Later, Mike and I watched a Netflix documentary about how the government lies to us (nothing new there!) and I hit the sack early and slept in this morning. It was a great day, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't survive it every day.