The quiet house returns ~ April 25, 1991

David Heiller

The house is quiet tonight, for the first time in three weeks. Twenty-three days, to be exact. That’s because Tyson and Brooks are gone. Their parents retrieved them this afternoon, af­ter a long vacation.

Brooks, Queen Ida, Noah and Tyson.

We’d been talking about today for a week or so, about when Mom and Dad would come. Mostly I did the talking, out of some sense of duty that the boys should be missing their parents more.

I told them my “Mommy-Daddy Tomorrow” story. http://davidheiller.blogspot.com/2011/04/mommy-daddy-tomorrow-february-3-1983.html That’s what this one kid at Camp Courage (back in 1972 would say, countless times every day, “Mommy-Daddy tomorrow?” He really missed his parents, but he drove us counselors nuts, for 10 days straight. We couldn’t wait for the day when he would say “Mommy- Daddy tomorrow?” and we could shout, “Yes, Jimmy, Mommy-Daddy are coming tomorrow!” When that morning finally arrived, we crowded around his bed. But Jimmy spoke up first in a deadpan voice, “Mommy-Daddy TODAY?”

Noah and Brooks

Brooks, age six, laughed at my story. He caught the irony, but he never said those words. He and Ty missed Barb and Steve, to be sure. But kids being kids, they put it in perspective, somewhere behind playing baseball, climbing rocks, eating cookies, falling in creeks, making snowmen, eating cookies, wallowing in frost-boils, reading books, eating cookies, taking baths, watching cartoons, eating cookies, play­ing with Legos, putting jigsaw puzzles together, and eating cookies.
Cindy made 450 cookies during the past 22 days, we figure. And they are all gone now, along with Ty and Brooks.

Story time: Malika, Noah, Brooks and Tyson.

IT’S FUNNY HOW your relationship with kids can change when they are “yours” tem­porarily. If you have them for a day or two, you treat them like glass. You don’t small-talk with them the same, you don’t hug them the same, you don’t give them a tongue-lashing when they fail to pick up the baseball bats. You don’t hold their hands on the way to work, you don’t send them to their room as punishment, you don’t gaze at them after they fall asleep. At least I don’t.

Tyson and some
Mama level grooming.

But that all changes after about three days. They reach out to hold your hand. They cry when they are sent to their room. They volunteer to sing grace at the supper table. They take their dishes to the sink without being as­ked. They crawl onto your lap as you make a fire in the morning. They crawl into your heart too.

They trust you to fish them out of the river when they fall in, or scoot behind them up a steep slab of rock at Jay Cooke State Park. They accidently call you “Dad” once in a while.

They reward you by saying things out of the blue like, “David, I like staying with you.” Tyson said that in the car one afternoon. Is there any finer praise?

You feel proud too at things like getting four kids, ages four to seven, bathed, hair-washed, brushed, and jammied like clockwork on a Saturday night. Four kids are a lot of work!

But somewhere along the line something clicks in you and you can tolerate the extra 10 decibels of noise. You can step between two yell­ing kids and cross-examine them and figure out who did what, and hand over the toy to the right person, and send the right person to his room for time-out.

You can tolerate, even laugh at, the endless arguments: who is the sickest, who has the most juice, who gets to sit in the front seat, who gets to bat first, who can sleep with Noah, right down to the pros and cons of looking at girls’ underwear (Brooks is pro, Mollie is con).

But that’s all gone now. We’re back to two. The house is mighty quiet tonight. I can’t help feeling a little sad about that. But more than that, I feel very lucky for having those two extra kids for the past three weeks. Twenty-three days, to be exact.