I have vivid childhood memories. Some of them have been delected from my memory bank, but there are some that stand out more than others. There were the years living in a four story apartment building on the top floor. The iceman would start out his journey to our apartment with a large chunk of ice and arrive with a small cube. Mother would carry the groceries up those four floors and I recall her making several trips to the grocery store so she could spread out the trips up and down the stairs. I remember spending summers at the farm of my maternal grandparents – making mudpies and feeding them to the dog, dressing the same dog in baby clothes and putting him in a toy high chair. We were not allowed to have dogs in the city apartment, so I took every advantage while I was at the farm.
My husband was also a city kid. He lived above the family funeral business, so had to maintain a fairly quiet childhood, but he made up for it when he spent his summers at his paternal grandparent’s summer house on the lake. There was a farm nearby where he learned to pitch hay and lead a horse to water. He remembers time on the lake as well and recalls when he was a young lad learning to swim. His mother donned him in a wool swimming suit. Can you even imagine wearing wool in the water. It would act as a sponge and soak up half the lake in just a minute. Add to that the fact that he was required to wear a life preserver jacket. After a few weeks of paddling around in the water with all these encumbrances, he decided one day to jump in without the life preserver. His father immediately called to him to put on his life jacket. As Paul got up on the pier, he accidentally kicked the jacket into the water and it immediately sank to the bottom of the lake. Wearing those woolen trunks and a useless life jacket accounted for his ability to learn to swim like a fish.
When we become parents we soon realize that it’s a risky business. You never know what each day will bring, but you can be sure it will be an adventure or a disaster. How you look at it is all important. There will be days that go smoothly and you really feel confident that you’re making a difference in your child’s life. Other days will bring disappointment, frustration, lack of communication and much more. One of the joys of being a grandparent is that you can enjoy the parenting without the responsiblity of the day to day stuff. It’s kind of too bad we can’t be grandparents first so we could get more joy out of the process, but then we wouldn’t be learning anything or teaching much. The one gift you can give your child, your grandchildren or even great grandchildren, is a love their heavenly Father – who forgives and loves unconditionally. He is the Father of all creation and has years of experience in dealing with the human race.
Proverbs 22:6 – Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
atimetoshare.me 
I learnt to swim by being chased by a dog at a water hole. Sometimes lessons in life are learnt in the most unexpected ways as I instantly learned to dogpaddle and from there copied other kids and how they swam. Still an ordinary swimmer after all of those decades.
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You are so right. Lessons all around us and you can teach an old dog new tricks. I should know😊
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As an old dog I also know.
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I enjoyed reading about your early childhood memories. Living on the top floor of a four story building would be tough for bringing home groceries. I lived in a third floor walk-up apartment for only a few months when I was in my forties and those stairs almost killed me.
My childhood memories are vivid, too. My first clear memory in life is a 6.7 California earthquake that happened when I was 19 months old. I was awakened in my crib by the earthquake. Everything was shaking, banging, rattling, and crashing all around me. I could hear people screaming and yelling. Later that day, my dad drove us out to see where the highway had fallen into the sea. I screamed at the top of my lungs, thinking that he was going to drive us off the broken highway into the ocean. I had nightmares about that for years.
A few days ago, I babysat for two of my husband’s great-grandchildren, all by myself, for a little over ten hours, while my husband and his daughter drove to Albuquerque for an important business appointment. The four-year-old boy is extremely hyperactive, and the ten-month-old girl wanted to be held almost constantly. Now, I am the eldest of seven, so I have been taking care of little ones since the first grade, when the twins were born. (I was an only child prior to this.) I also raised three children of my own. I thought it would be a piece of cake, babysitting for those two. NOT!!!
I discovered that the best way to handle the extremely hyperactive preschooler was to join him in his hyperactivites. I became: NINJA GRANDMA! I ran and yelled and Ninja’d with him all over the house for hours, often with the ten-month-old in my arms to keep her from crying. OH MAN, was I sore the next day!
Today I am very grateful that God gives us women menopause. He knows we aren’t up to childcare when we reach a certain age. Especially not with a hyperactive four-year-old NINJA!
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Oh I can just imagine you as ninja grandma. I was a pretty good story teller to my grandkids though. I also created some interesting voices for Barbie and her friends.
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That sounds like fun. 🙂
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Yep!
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Loved reading about your childhood! My memories are of living on the edge of a small town in a neighborhood that had 30 children in it. Summer nights spent playing games, catching lightening bugs and laying on the front yard watching for shooting stars are some of my memory highlights.
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Beautiful memories! Like I said, I was a city girl so life on the farm was a refuge for me. Still we had fun in the city too😍. We enjoyed many of the things you recall from your youth. We had a ton of kids in the neighborhood too and thought up things to entertain ourselves like putting on plays in the backyard, cowboys and Indians, listening to records and dancing. It was a different time .
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