Growing Pains

Our ten-year-old granddaughter, Kathryn, is realizing her dream this summer. She is enrolled in an intense, one-week gymnastics course, something she has wanted to do for a long time. Her parents are both at work and she is staying with Oma and Opa for the week. Our job is to get up earlier, help her make her lunch, get breakfast ready, drive her to the gym for the day and pick her up again. After gymnastics, she has an hour of "electronics" to relax, then we eat supper, play a game or two of "Aggravation," talk about the day, and go to bed. Opa washes her gym suit and hangs it up to dry for the night, while Kathryn and I spend a bit of time reading before bedtime.

Yesterday was her first day and Kathryn came home very stiff and sore. "No pain, no gain" is one of Oma's favorite sayings, but I bit my tongue and had lots of sympathy. Kathryn's mom came over in the evening and there was more TLC. 

At bedtime we decided to get a chapter book from the book shelves downstairs and I told Kathryn about one of my very favorite children's authors, Jean Little. Little grew up in Taiwan, the child of medical doctors. She became blind very early in life and has great sympathy for children with disabilities. This shines through in every one of her books. I have wonderful memories of going to some of her readings with our youngest daughter. Jean always had a seeing-eye dog with her, which was an added attraction for the children.

Kathryn decided on the book called Home From Far. It is about a girl, Jenny, whose twin brother is killed in a car accident, and how that affects the rest of the family. They decide to reach out to another troubled family by taking in two of their children, one of whom has the same name as the brother Jenny lost. Kathryn loves the book and decided that we should read two chapters after gymnastics (instead of spending time with electronic games) and two before bedtime, in order to get trhough the book in five days. We'll see if that happens!

 

Home From Far was published in 1965, and Little has some "archaic" expressions and terms we wouldn't use today, such as, "Hilda was fat. Her face was fat and her legs and arms were fat and her clothes made her look even fatter." Kathryn has been taught not to use that word to describe people because of the effect it has on them. However, this does not detract but rather enhances the book for Kathryn, as it gives us an opportunity to talk about some of these things.

This morning Kathryn got up and moaned and groaned about how much her body ached. We were making her lunch and having breakfast. Opa was taking her to the gym and I stayed at home to catch up on some things I needed to do. She looked at me with her big hazel eyes and said, "Oma, I wish I was like you. You just get to stay home and do whatever you like."  Secretly, I had been wishing I was like her, so fresh and young, her whole life before her! I said, "Kathryn, you have the whole summer to do what you like." "But Oma," she said, "you have your whole life to do what you like!" I smiled, gave her a hug, and told her some day she would probably be as lucky as me!

Mother Teresa says it well: "It is not how much we are doing but how much love, how much honesty, how much faith is put into doing it. It makes no difference what we are doing. What you are doing, I cannot do. Only sometimes we forget and spend more time looking at somebody else and wishing that we were doing something else. We waste our time thinking of tomorrow, and today we let the day pass, and yesterday is gone."