AND SO THEY WILL REMAIN

I took the twins to their doctor appointment yesterday for their annual checkup. She asked a lot of questions about family history. When we got to my grandparents, she asked in amazement, "They're HOW OLD??!!" And then she told the girls, "You sure picked the right family." Not that we actually get to pick, but yeah, the genes are prettty good. And that bit also made me think of... the food. I believe health and
longevity can depend on nutrition to a certain extent. We lived in Amish country. I thought of all the fresh produce, local dairy, the healthy lean meat we always enjoyed on our table... and other stuff (like how kids were forced to eat things they didn't want). Thankfully, the bit in parentheses no longer stops me from eating good food, it has only adjusted how I do it (I don't force the little girl when she needs things to be more lax). And then the good doc tells me my kiddies are healthy, but slightly underweight. Which calls into question just about EVERYTHING for me about my parenting skills and how I have handled my history in regard to my babies.

This one little appointment has jogged a lot of memory. Not all of it is bad. I know my grandparents were products of The Great Depression, but they did, and still do, love us (though in some ways dysfunctional). They wanted their offspring to eat and survive. To take advantage of the bounty they scrambled to secure for us even when times were tough for others. It's awful how the past and present intersect. EVEN when people take pains at great personal cost to make sure they don't. The little girl wants to call her gramma and grampa and she wishes her uncle B never got killed in that accident because he used to bake goodies for her and use his garden hose to fill his backyard to freeze so she could put on her skates and FLY back there. She would fly free and then eat cookies and brownies and play PacMan. Uncle B was a very nice man. Nice people are not supposed to get killed when little kids love them.

And the little girl can't call her gramma and grampa (and why are there flashbacks of their house that I don't understand?). She can't call them right now because they are very old and they are sleeping. We will be sleeping in a few minutes as well. After that, I have no clue... In the meanwhile, Rambo went on an extra shopping trip and stocked the place to the extent that I had to rearrange the kitchen to fit it all. He bought LOTS of chocolate protein shakes. I guess that's good. I just hope no one in here thinks there will be a famine or something. There won't be. I've got this and I can do it. And I can do it better and more reasonably than those who came before me. I WILL do it better for the health and longevity of my children. The motive is the same, but the methods are as different as night and day. AND SO THEY WILL REMAIN.