Isla and Me
Judy Conlin
The long looked forward to Spring Break is over, and I found out many things during this
reunion with my grandson and great granddaughter. It was truly an exceptionally high point in
my life, and I feel privileged that I got to have this learning curve at this rather late time in my
life. In my column today, I will try to be honest and tell you about Isla and me.
Isla is my great granddaughter and I am her Yaya. To my embarrassment I kept thinking she was seven years old, but I found out she was eight. I hadn’t seen her for many years, and I guess I lost track. I was surprised at how smart she was, although I shouldn’t have been since her dad graduated at the top of his class in Law School. She can read anything and read all the texts on my phone questioning me about what this or that meant, and with my limited capacity, I often had no idea. She knows every type of dinosaur, corrected my pronunciation of their names, and knew every little detail about their habits. She came with a backpack full of realistic toy dinosaurs plus one lent to her by her friend, Adam, who she informed she had known since kindergarten.
I was surprised at how argumentative she was. Again, with a father who Is a lawyer, maybe that was to be expected also. She knew exactly how things should be done and always had a compelling winning argument as to why she was right. She likes to know ahead of time just how things are going to go. The first evening she asked me what we would have for dinner that night. I told her, but whatever it was wasn’t to her liking. “Can you make pasta?” she asked.
“Of course, I can,” I replied.
“I want pasta with butter on it, a little bit of olive oil and salt.”
“No sauce?”
“No sauce.”
“I prepared the food and set it before her on a little kitty plate.”
“I need it in a bowl,” she said. I transferred it to a bowl and she ate several helpings. This girl knows her mind. We went to an Italian restaurant the next day for lunch, and I was worried how I was going to get this precise order to the waitress. I worried in vain. The children’s menu had spaghetti with butter. The waitress brought olive oil, and all was well. I was the one who was out of touch with this recipe.
I also found things out about myself. I was not a perfect great grandmother. Isla wants to do everything by herself. I was the same way as a kid and still now. She watches what someone does, where things are kept and goes about helping herself. Sometimes, the two of us clashed (like an incident where she had gone to the refrigerator, removed a plum, taken a sharp knife out of the drawer and was cutting up the plum. I was appalled. She was arguing and I was yelling. That wasn’t the only time we clashed. I think it may have been because we both had similar personalities, but I was supposed to be the adult, for heaven’s sake,
She was also a great cuddler. Some mornings she got up early, dressed herslf, and then crawled into bed with me, with the TV on a kid’s show. She would hug me and explain what was happening. She had 3 small dinosaurs perched in front of the TV so they could watch too. “We’re going to do this every day,” she said. She melted my heart just as she did when she sat on my lap in my chair every day.
She loved the wildlife around the house and spent hours studying the turtles (which she constantly told me were tortoises, not turtles) and hand fed them cat food treats, strawberries, and bananas.
She was completely unimpressed by all the dolls, doll houses, stuffed animals I had, and even was completely uninterested in the toast I made her in a Hello Kitty toaster that left and in=mage of a cat on the toast. “Make a dinosaur,” she said.
To you this may not have sounded like a perfect spring break (and I know I wasn’t perfect) but I am so happy having this charming, bright, self-reliant little person in my life. Come back soon, Isla.
More later,
Isla’s Yaya aka Judy www.nursejudyinfo.com
