Lake Michigan: No Salt, No Sharks, No Worries
I have taken up a temporary residence in Evanston, Illinois where my barely functional Juliet balcony overlooks a sliver of Lake Michigan. We have enjoyed our distant view and walking our labradoodle to its shores but today we decided to take the plunge with our grandchildren. As a Florida native accustomed to waters that flirt with bathtub-temperatures, I approached the 72 degree water with a measure of trepidation. With good reason. My 72 year old body flinched immediately upon contact with Lake Michigan’s 72 degree temp. Within minutes, however, my lower limbs adapted and my granddaughter and I submitted the rest of our selves to the cold waters (she much more enthusiastically than me.)
I’m not sure if it was the temperature or the absence of salt and potentially menacing sea creatures that seduced me, but Lake Michigan’s chilly waters provided an excellent playground for our young and older foursome.
Sandcastle Fun
And, as we apparently couldn’t get enough of the cold, we stopped for ice cream on the way home.
It was a perfect final day of summer vacation. I have not, heretofore, enjoyed the opportunity to spend a chuck of summer break with my Chicagoland grandchildren. I instituted Camp Kitchens where bike riding tutorials, movies, arts and crafts, trips to the zoo, beach days, and labradoodle snuggling were on the syllabus. I’m going to miss my buddies when they turn back into owls next week (school mascot.) At eight and ten, they are highly functional humans, have delightful, albeit evolving, senses of humor, and are great playmates.
A lot has been written about the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. Grand parenting is our reward for all the caregiving we have administered over the years. Being a grandparent is like eating an ice cream sundae every day, with no calorie penalties. It’s delicious. One of the chapters in my book, Be Brave. Lose the Beige: Finding Your Sass After Sixty, prescribes the Grandmother’s Rules of Procedure (GPR). These tongue-in-cheek guidelines are intended to keep us relevant to our kids and their kids. They include:
(1) Shine a light for your children. Remind them most spats and injuries are temporary; (2) be useful, helping when you can; (3) be indulgent and skirt a few pesky parental rules; (4) avoid playing the victim card; (5) keep your mouth shut. Keep your anxieties and opinions to yourself or share them with friends; and last but far from least (6) Be an advocate for yourself because grand- mothering can be taxing on the body.
Hopefully I followed my own advice this summer. It’s been a privilege to freeze my butt off in Lake Michigan, to sustain a concussion teaching them how to ride bicycles (although “privilege” might be a stretch), gaining weight from ice cream, jelly bellies, and popcorn, and most of all wrapping my heart up in a box with a bow and handing it to my loved ones saying, “It’s all yours.”