www.NewVentures.ca

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much the last couple weeks. Trust me this isn’t because of lack of things to write/chat/rant about but rather just being too darned busy!

Yes Christmas is coming which I think takes care of a good chunk of many peoples spare time this time of year. So that is certainly a part of it. But with Christmas in this part of the world comes snow, storms and just plain weather. A case in point was the last two days.

We (my wife and I) were asked to look after our two grandsons (both under 5) for a couple of hours while my son in law drove to work. Both of them (son in law and daughter) work at the airport and once in a while have overlapping shifts, which means that sometimes we are lucky enough to babysit the boys for a couple of hours.

This particular time they were dropped off due to the weather, he didn’t want them in the car with him on the road. It was dangerous, and while he may have had no choice to be there, he could at least make sure the kids weren’t and so we got them for a short while…. we thought…

It took him much longer than he had expected to get to the airport and the storm had gotten much worse, and was still building. They did the right thing and were smart in deciding to take a hotel room at the airport, instead of trying to fight though the storm to get home. So our two hour babysitting job turned into much, much more!

My wife and I have often said, “There’s a reason why you have children in your twenties.” We usually say this after just two hours of being managed by two high energy boys. Well we’ve just survived about 24 hours with them now… It was an interesting and very fun time. Don’t get me wrong they were precious and extremely well behaved, but they are a full time job all by themselves!’

Yesterday, by the time the youngest boy had left (the older of the two having been dropped off to school that morning by ‘Grandma’,) I was ready to collapse, except now I had to catch up on some of the things that I couldn’t do earlier with him. (Like dig out the 60+ centimeters of snow that had fallen and blown into the driveway.)

My wife managed to hang in and stay up ’till about 9:30 and I dragged myself upstairs around 10:30 (we both usually stay up way past eleven.) Now this morning I look around at all the “other stuff” that needs to be done. All the little things that got put aside while the boys were here… and now I have a full day of just doing all those little things that needed to get done earlier…

Man, I would do it again in a heartbeat, the fun, the laughter, the conversations, the joy and the love make it all worthwhile. Those 24hours were filled with enough activities and stories to fill a book. But there is a reason why we are grandparents now – we’d never make it if we had to spend ALL our time raising kids again – it kinda makes me wonder how we did it the first time!

So…. now back to work…. till next time ….