Beech Tree News Network

“What did you do in school today?” I asked my granddaughter, Sabria, one day after school.

“Oh, this and that,” she replied.

It was the same response she always gives when you ask her what she did or learned in school that day.

The next time I picked her up, I tried a different approach.  “Besides this and that, did you do anything interesting in school today?” I asked.

“Recess,” she said, as she waved to her friends from the passenger seat.  When it involves school and friends, Sabria plays her cards close to the vest.  Thankfully, when she spends time with Garey and me, she is an open book.

She spent Friday night and most of Saturday with us; during which time we played with the toys she keeps at our house.  We raced cars on Magic Tracks.  We put the battery-operated Zhu mice in cans and boxes and on the high wire then laughed as my cat, Figaro, sat warily by in pounce-mode, afraid to actually pounce on the overgrown rodents.  Next, we played with the Monster High dolls, Lagoona and Gill.  Sabria is always Lagoona and I am always Gill.  Lagoona is always the teacher and Gill the student.  Gill sits patiently as Lagoona demonstrates acrobatic stunts that he is supposed to imitate.  Even though he tries his best, Gill rarely does the stunts to Lagoona’s standards.

I let Sabria direct most of our play, but sometimes, I have to put my foot down, especially if it involves things she just thinks she knows about, but doesn’t really know about, like melting candle wax or making slime.  “You are going to have to let me show you how to do this or you are not going to do this,” I tell her.  She concedes and lets me measure the glue and the Borax then she stirs or she lets me do the wax melting and she pours it into the molds.  

Occasionally, I walk into a room and find her in the middle of an experiment that I did not pre-sanction.  One such experiment took place Friday night.  It involved a foaming substance spilling over from a cup onto my bathroom counter.  “It’s elephant toothpaste,” she informed me.  I handed her a roll of paper towels then went back to my TV program.  Sometimes, the experiments go awry, like the one with a balloon and a water faucet.  Several bath towels became involved.

When Sabria visits, these kinds of things are usual occurrences at our house.  On Friday night, she deviated from her usual shenanigans a bit, however.  She decided she would create a new super hero, and she decided I would be the model for her.  I was pleased until I realized I had to be the actual model.  The first thing she did was braid and rubber-band my hair together into six separate “horns” for lack of a better word.  She asked for my box of material scraps then measured most of my body parts and started sewing scraps of material together.  I moved the whole operation to the living room, where Garey was watching TV.  I gave him the job of rethreading the needle.  (I didn’t want him to get left out.)  About half-way through the process, Sabria became bored and moved onto another project.  I was a super-hero in search of half a costume, and I’m still removing pieces of rubber band from my hair.

You know, my granddaughter may learn only this and that at school, but as her grandmother, I have made the effort to supplement her education.  She can put race tracks together, replace batteries in toy mice, snap dolls’ legs back in place and spread towels on the bathroom floor to catch overflow from the faucet.  If an elephant ever needs its teeth brushed, Sabria’s your girl.  Most importantly, now that Stan Lee has passed on to that great Comic-Con in the sky, somebody will have to fill the void.  Sabria is already working on the prototype.  She just needs to finish the costume.