Some people come into your life just when you need them the most and you can’t imagine life ever being as good without them. Grandma Nadine and Papa Dale are those people for us. They are not my children’s grandparents but yes they are.
When we adopted Austin, and the maternity leave ran out and I was looking at going back to work as a full time teacher, a lovely lady we knew told us a long story of her son’s daycare. There was a small farm, with a husband and a wife running a 6 child daycare, and the story involved the Grandma taking the kids fishing in the irrigation ditch and at the end of the adventure distracting the boy until she could slip a trout she had bought, dead at the grocery store, on the boys line. He pulled it in and danced around in the thrill of success and eventually carried it all over the apple orchard and carrot patch and showed it off to everyone before begging her to cook it for lunch. She slipped the hot, muddy fish in the compost and cooked up some frozen fishsticks and the boy bragged about that fish for months.
I was so delighted when grandma Nadine had an opening for my 6 week old. And she asked me to buy him cloth diapers to keep there because she loved hanging freshly laundered diapers on the clothes line in the sun. She was a relic from another time, but 21 years later is still around. I loved her energy and creativity and joy and compassion. She added in my second son a year later, and as all our blood relatives were 1300 miles away, the daycare kids and grandparents were the most real family the boys knew. She wasn’t exactly honest. She got them to eat the ham on their salad by telling them she had taken her shotgun and killed the screaming bird next door and it was smoked peacock.
She also fed them possum and rattlesnake and amazingly bowls of caviar (banana oatmeal.) But most importantly she nourished their imagination and their bodies. Imagine Me, the sugar addict, stunned by my son begging for “broccoli Stalks” and beets. No wonder she could take two, two year olds on her lap and rise from sitting crosslegged on the floor without using her hands at age 75! The pictures show her, long after they were out of daycare surrounded by some of “her kids” at a weekend gathering, in the same spot the picture on the right was taken during the daycare days. In the older picture the boy in Yellow is my oldest. He is bottom right in the newer shot and his brother is snuggled beneath her left arm on the right of the picture
Fun shots! What great people to have "stand in" for your boys' family members when they couldn't be there from day to day. Our boys had a ton of "adopted" aunts and uncles from all our Bible studies and church related activities.
