It’s been a while since Grandma Mary and I watched the granddaughters for an overnight stint.
The granddaughters’ mom and dad were headed to Minneapolis to celebrate their wedding anniversary and take in a Vikings game, so Mary and I were recruited for overnight childcare duties at their home in Hartford.
The granddaughters, Brooke and Ellee, are ages 4 and 2 respectfully, so one might think we’re going to have our hands full. Therefore, preplanning was important.
We took them to Brookings, South Dakota, to the children’s museum. I figured with drive time from Hartford to Brookings and back that would take up two hours and maybe we would spend an hour or two at the museum.
I had the travel time pegged, but having never been to the museum I under estimated the time spent there by two hours. The museum is a grandpa’s dream. Not only did the girls have a great three-plus hours there, I found it to be awesome myself.
On the ride back to Hartford the girls fell asleep, so the ride home was a piece of cake.
Grandma Mary and I decided to press our luck and make a couple of stops in Sioux Falls before heading back to Hartford.
Have you ever been to Costco and Wal-Mart on a Saturday?
I know what you’re probably saying to yourself, “WHY, WHY, WHY would you do that?”
As it turns out, we have the perfect granddaughters. The free samples at Costco and picking out a toy of their choice at Wal-Mart might have helped, and in my book, the money spent on toys was worth every penny.
So all in all the day was stress-free and as close to perfect as possible — Close.
To make things easier for us when we went anywhere, we drove Jenna’s vehicle because it was equipped with the girls’ car seats.
As any grandparent will tell you, we would rather have a root canal than have to transfer car seats from one vehicle to another.
Once we had the girls safely fastened into the car seats, I got behind the wheel and backed Jenna’s foreign model SUV out of the garage. That is where the stress free day was about to end.
Grandma Mary and I never did find the button to shut the garage door. Never mind the button I thought was the button to shut the door turned out to be some sort of emergency call for help button.
Thank goodness I stopped just short of pushing that button. So I did the next best thing I took my index finger and pushed into Mary’s shoulder; of course she gave me that what the heck was that for look.
I told her she just became the garage door button. Thankfully she obliged, and with the door closed we were on our way.
Having limited experience driving Jenna’s vehicle, you can imagine the trouble I was going to have finding out how to turn on the windshield wipers when it started to rain.
Not only was it starting to rain, I was about to enter a construction zone on I-29’s north bound lane. The rain was picking up and so far I was only able to activate the rear window wiper.
With the stress level elevating minute by minute, I finally found the lever to activate the windshield wipers.
Well at least I thought so. The rain was causing a visibility issue and with the orange construction comes flashing the side window I had to make do with flicking up the wiper level to manually wipe the windshield free of rain.
Once out of the construction zone, I devoted my efforts to figuring out how to turn the darn wipers on.
In every American-made vehicle, at least in my world, you turn everything on by turn of the knob, the dial, the twisty thing at the end of the lever to the right.
I came to find out in foreign vehicles, that’s not so much the case. They seem to favor turning things to the left. Finally I got the wipers on just after the sun came out.
Vehicle issue aside, the day spent with the granddaughters was about as good as it gets.