When my son was preparing for the end of his high school days and hedging on whether to go on to college because “four years is a long time”, I told him to go ask his then 96 year old great-grandmother if she thought 4 years was a long time. When my then 75 year old father took a spill on his Harley and wound up in the hospital, the first words he spoke were, “don’t tell my mother”. Obviously, I had to, and with much trepidation, I said to my grandmother, “Gram, I have some bad news about Stan”. Her reply was, “is he in jail again?” That broke the ice and as she so often did, my grandmother made a difficult situation easier, and we actually had a laugh over it, despite its seriousness. Of course my father fully recovered, and is looking at new Harleys as I write this. His mother, my grandmother, Cora Spain, passed away on December 22 at the age of 99 years. So, this last month of the year was a bit sad for me but certainly there is some consolation in that she lived a long good life. I’m sure she is happy to be reunited with her husband, another Stanley Spain, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 96.
Tag Archives: Parenting
Waterballs
I’d never heard of a waterball until a young girl almost died in one recently. Now maybe it’s me, but as soon as I saw a picture of one I could hear my mother’s voice telling me to never, ever, ever put a plastic bag over your head. Makes sense. Of course, I understand that everyone has good common sense and would be sure that their child could breathe before climbing inside a waterball, and like all good parents, I assumed there was a way to breath inside one. FAIL, there’s not. I went to this site and discovered on the FAQ page that there is enough air inside the ball to breath “for a long time”. Ha, ha, ha! There’s no way I get into one of those things and thusly not my kid.
On a lighter darker note, the web site also mentions the “Loveball”, in which two people can enter and float around the pool in, at night. NOT.
I’ll stay with my good ole rubber tube.
