Ten-Finger Exercises

Thinking Ahead, and Backwards

My grandchildren, 6 yr old twins Jack and Sophie, are coming to spend a week with us next month and attend vacation Bible school at our church. Sign-ups haven’t happened yet, so we’re still not completely committed, but we’re headed in that direction. Today I’m started to plan, knowing that I’ll need whatever preparations I can make in advance to supplement my basic survival skills.

I was thinking about shopping for a pull-out trundle bed. Even though the twins are perfectly okay on the floor in their sleeping bags, designated space to sleep in should be easier to enforce. (Are you laughing at me yet?) Of course they may still argue about who gets the bed and who gets the trundle, but at least there will be boundaries of sorts.

Maybe I should be laughing at myself, remembering when my two, Hap and Lenore, shared a room for a time. The room had twin beds with bright red bedspreads. I’d made a Roman shade for the window from a flamestitch pattern fabric of reds and oranges and blues and covered the inside of a 6 ft bookcase with the same fabric. The beds were against opposite walls, and I told the kids that the dark blue shag carpet was the ocean, and to stay out of it for fear of sharks. They were too old by then to be scared by such a silly threat, and I knew that or I wouldn’t have said it. They were also too clever. They jumped from bed to bed.

My next consideration is what to feed the twins. Since Hap had spent his first few years living in Japan and Lenore had been born there, rice was a staple at our house. I could cook up fried rice from just about anything so long as I had onions and peas. Last night’s roast beef or a couple of hot dogs chopped up would feed a bunch of us, fried in a cast iron skillet using ‘planned-over’ leftover rice. I called it “Whatcha-gotchi.”

Later on, despite warnings from an acquaintance that one could never trust an ‘intuitive cook,’ I expanded my menu to include various things made with meat de jour, tomato sauce and pasta. Voila: ‘Whatcha-getti’ and ‘Whatcha-gatoni.’ Melt cheese on it and they’d eat it.

I might get away with some of that kitchen creativity with Sophie, the more adventuresome of the two in the eating division, but not with Jack. He doesn’t want his food to ‘touch’ each other, and chances of his eating it increase if it’s hidden in Ranch dressing. He’s also pretty picky about what’s under there. I suppose a supply of mac and cheese and hotdogs will still hold up as kid fare though. We’ll see.