Back to Biscuit Wednesdays..

Here we are again, biscuit wednesday is the day we go to collect John's grandsons after school and take them back to their house until their parents get back from work. We only do this day once a week, and over the years, starting when they were both at nursury, we have religiously managed to get over and collect and look after them. It means that we have had much more contact than the other grandparents, and we are so lucky. Watching them grow up week by week, being close to them, has brought great happpiness to my husband and myself. Before we had this arrangement I had had quite a difficult relationship with his daughter, their mother. From the outset, despite me not being the reason that their parents' marriage had broken, she simply despised me, and being the eldest child, it meant that the other siblings did too.. so not a happy time all round. Then after the boys were born and she could see how much I really did love them too, she has changed enormously and we are quite good friends now, and her sister and brother are much nicer too! Having had five children of my own and three of them providing me with grandchildren, I already have 9 blood grandchildren, but these two boys were icing on the cake, and I loved them just as much as all the others.. But the best bit of Christmas this year past, was the fact that John's son and his wife gave the family a little girl called Amelia and she has made everyone so happy. In the early days of our babysitting, we used to get the boys to practice their reading, but now that they are almost 10 and 8, and can read perfectly well, we have had to invent other things to do. John would rather be interacting with them, than sitting watching them watching tv, and so he tried to teach them Chess. This was a big success, and in fact the boys have taken to it so well, they sometimes beat their grandfather! Football is another area where they can interact. John has found a renewed interest in knowing all about news of the football world, and the fact that both boys play for teams at the weekend makes it all so much more real. When I had my children, I had a boy then a girl, then another girl, finishing up with another two boys...so football was not heavily on our agenda. My boys seemed to prefer athletics or basketball , not really football. For myself, I can do without standing on the sidelines in the freezing cold, waiting for the teams to play.. god the times I got heavy colds doing that, doesn't bear thinking about.!!! With the addition of this new granddaughter, I wonder what her delights will be... will it be ballet like for a lot of little girls, or running or tennis or netball.. all that to find out. At the moment she is only 10 days old and her future is all before her..lucky her.. The weather has been grey and quite miserable, but that is to be expected for winter isnt it? We forget, having had a reasonable summer last year, just how grey and wet and cold it can be in Winter, but once January is out of the way and the little buds start appearing and spring seems round the corner, the cold seems more bearable. This January I am quite getting excited, because on the 23rd of this month I am going to visit my son in Australia. He lives there in Perth with his second wife and their two sons. I have never visited before, so its going to be quite an adventure. If you have read previous posts, I have Cauda Equina Syndrome, which means my nether parts are part paralysed, so I have no idea when is happening down below, and have to be pretty aware and manage as best I can, so this long trip will tax all my strength to keep on top of my necessary needs and medications. I tried late last year to visit my brother in the South of France and that went pretty well, so gave me confidence to seek further afield flights.. I am sure I will have the holiday of a lifetime and cannot wait to get started. Luckily my husband is content to stay home and he will do the collecting and babysitting on his own with the boys. They are really such easy kids to care for.. as long as they are fed and watered and happily playing games or reading, we do not get any trouble from them at all. Probably because we do go home and not there all the time! The live about a forty minute drive from us, so easily driven there. Their house is a very large semi in a very pretty village. It would be nice, if when we downsize from our Rectory, we could find a home in the same village, but that is not going to be for a couple more years. anything might happen in that time. It would be most pleasant though to be able to be near the boys and in a smaller house in a pretty village..we shall see. With Amelia, we have offered babysitting too, although they are just over an hour away...I know that with distances in Canada and America ,much larger distances are usually between families, so its quite viable to offer our services to her, as we would love to be just as involved as with the boys. So, I am getting ready to put my coat on, take my crochet to do, and a book to read maybe, and we shall be off in a minute... Biscuit Wednesdays are so called, because in the early days, there was always a large tin of biscuits for the boys to eat from, and that is how it got its name*