Healing Grandma's Heart

This is going to be a random post, as it's been one helluva tumultuous month and everything is pretty jumbled up in my brain at the moment.

All you need to know, dear reader, is that Grandma RuthAnn is finally on an upward healing trajectory; I was able to spend some time with her in the ICU; Armando and the kids kept each other alive and well-fed and entertained, although the house and car were complete food and toy-ridden disasters (he had actually used the shop vac to clean inside the house!) and the fridge contained moldy yogurt, strawberries that had turned into red raisins, and a tooth-marred block of cheese, just sitting there all forlorn and alone on the bottom shelf.

Anika and Reni had their own ways of responding to me being gone for six days -- the longest I'd ever been away from them before was four hours, not including my labor with Reni -- and Reni is still having pretty severe nightmares. His potty training has regressed to nothing at all, and not even the promise of an M&M will get him to sit on the toilet anymore. While I was gone, he actually asked Armando "if mama is with the clouds and wind," because it was sunny and calm at home and he thought maybe I had left with the wind. Anika is a bit more snuggly than usual, but for the first few days of my homecoming she was actually withholding her affection because she was angry with me for going to see Grandma and Grandpa without her. (I should have seen this coming, because during several video chats in the hospital, Reni would smile and wave but Anika would frown and grumble, "Where's Grandpa? I want to see Grandma!!") She would not talk to me or look at me when they arrived at the airport to pick me up, and wouldn't let me tuck her into bed that night. She was also pretty upset when she found out that I was hanging with her cousins, too. She loves her Amalia and her Sofia-that-lives-far-away (she has another friend named Sophia who lives just a few miles away).

She and Reni were both highly disappointed that I did not bring back a cat or two for them, since they know Aunt Becca recently acquired two furry friends. And they are both begging on an almost daily basis to ride an airplane and visit Grandma.

While I missed my kids like crazy, I now realize just how LOUD and FAST they are. Reni runs everywhere, because Anika runs everywhere. They can make a mud puddle and completely cake themselves with dirt in a New York minute, and scream like banshees while doing it. Reni screams whenever he is frustrated, which is often, and Anika screeches back, because she can and because it gets his goat. They like to race: scooters, bikes, towels across the floor, piling pillows - anything they can make into a race, they will.

And clever. They are really clever. To wit: this morning, Armando asked the kids what they wanted for breakfast. "Dessert!" Reni said. Gotta give the kid props for trying.

About a week or so ago, Reni demanded chocolate milk for a picnic he and Anika were setting up in her room with her toy kitchen and wooden food. Armando tightened the cap on the sippy cup so that he wouldn't spill milk all over the new carpet. "Open it," Reni said. "No, because then it can spill," Armando told him. "But we want it REAL pretend!" he insisted. Real pretend is now his phrase for whenever he is doing something he shouldn't be doing, as in taking a knife from the kitchen and using it to "cut" the wooden birthday cake or putting fruit snacks on the dolls' plates. "It's REAL PRETEND," he will tell you.

One day, I found them both on the couch eating a large piece of cheese. "Where did you get that?", I asked Anika. "I cut it myself," she said. Confused, as I saw no blood or evidence of band-aids, I raced into the kitchen to see three knives laying on the floor: a bread knife, a cheese knife, and a sharp paring knife. She had tried all three, experimenting until she found one that worked. All three knives are located in different places in the kitchen, and somehow she had done all this without being discovered by either of us parents. Oops.