Winnah, Winnah, Chicken Dinnah!

I was always something of a messy child.  Not a total piglet, mind you, but a stacker and a piler.  I think, in hindsight, this was a good thing, for it prepared me for a life that did not proceed in a neat-as-a-pin, orderly fashion.  I think it's why  I can usually handle a little chaos.  To wit, when one of life's myriad bumps in the road brought my daughter Melanie, and her two kids, Jaiden, and Briar, to our home to live with Jim and me.

The time together actually passed quite smoothly and quickly during the six months they were with us.  The house was once again filled with the bustles of a young family, their comings and goings, and the inevitable helping with homework.  Remembering one of my favorite of those occasions:

It had been a  busy week at our house, and the kids had been going to bed later than usual, with homework piling up, packing, attending their first funeral, and other such things.  Melanie was very busy preparing to move out into a house of their own, so I had been charged with helping the grandkids do their homework after we returned from dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant.  I was also charged with having them both in bed no later than 8:30, which was still later than their usual bedtime

Fortunately, Briar had had a short day at school and finished his homework early.  He had earned some Club Penguin time on the computer, which left me free to help Jaiden.  Good thing, for she had assignments in math, science, language arts, and history.  Jaiden and I retired to the bedroom to get started on what looked like a full evening  of work. I was thanking my lucky stars that I still remembered how to find circumference, diameter, and radius in case she needed help with her geometry.  Midway through the assignment though, her fortitude seemed to flag--and we still had much more work to complete.

I noticed that she still kept on her bed a pair of Melanie's red satin pajama shorts that Jaiden has used as her special "wubbie" since birth.  I commented that compared with supervising homework,  I had much more fun playing peek-a-boo with her when she was five months old, covering her face in the red satin, and taking much delight in her chortles and wildly flailing arms and legs.  So, we decided that she needed to put the shorts on her head, and, working independently of each other, if we came up with the same answer to a math problem, she'd  thrash her arms and legs and I would scream, "Winnah, winnah, chicken dinnah!"  No doubt about it, Grama and Jaiden are certified lame-os.  But thirty plus years in the classroom taught me nothing if not, that when instructional interest wanes, insert something bizarre and otherwise pointless.  Always my go-to lesson plan!

 Having finished the math, we moved on to a summary of plate tectonics, which I had taught about many for years, and which Jaiden understood quite well without my help.  Then a compare and contrast assignment from very interesting story about a newspaper boy in the Great Depression.  While Jaiden continued to work, I put Briar to bed and armed him with his trusty flashlight so he could read from Harry Potter for a few more minutes.

Needing a bit of movement and a change of scene, Jaiden and I headed out to the couch in the living room to tackle key points about ancient Egypt during the Middle and New Kingdoms. (Have I mentioned that none of the assignments that night were remotely like anything I learned about in sixth grade?)  Jaiden was quite impressed with my knowledge of this era. I didn't tell her it was mostly from having watched so many Charleston Heston and Debra Paget pot-boilers in the fifties.  Some of Granny's secrets, are better kept, mummy-like, under wraps! She'd have no idea who those helpful old movie stars were, so I just told her to just keep watching PBS, like her grandparents.

By 9:30, Jaiden staggered off to bed, homework completed, and ready for night-night.  After tucking her in with her satin and kissing her goodnight, I wandered over to the computer to check out Facebook.  All I can say is that after two and a half hours of school work, "Winnah, winnah, chicken dinnah!" had lost some of its luster.  The "baby" Jaiden Raine still looked  smashing in her red satin, and Grama Marilyn looked like she should be permanently placed UNDER a peek-a-boo blankie!