Every time we arrived at our Oklahoma Grandmother’s home, oatmeal lace cookies were what we looked for. Thin, delicate, crisp, crunchy, they were unlike any other we ate elsewhere.
Those and her wonderful cooking, along with her fantastic collection of scrapbooks about the royal families of England, were her grandmother thing for us. Our South Carolina Grandmother let us rummage through family treasures — letters from her parents prior to their marriage, letters, photos, and papers stored in every imaginable nook and cranny, boxes of books in the smokehouse and treasures of bygone years gave us hours of pleasure along with a tremendous sense of history.
I never thought much about the time they spent with us; I guess I just thought they existed only for us. I now know they both had careers; one, an insurance agent along with her husband, the other, in addition to overseeing a large farm, also taught foreign languages and math.
“Working mothers” wasn’t even a term then, and “working Grannies” isn’t a term now, but many of us grannies are, and like my grannies, we must find a way to do our own “Grandmother thing.”
Making cookies is a great Grandmother thing many busy grannies forego. The time problem was solved by using a purchased pie crust. I treasure memories — you may too — of baking scraps of pie crust sprinkled with cinnamon sugar along with my mom’s pies.
Bypassing the pie making, Lauren and I went right to the pie crust cutting, using ready-made crusts. Cut in butterfly shapes and covered with green sugar sprinkles, we cut 12 “cookies” from one crust. The time this took us was just about right for our attention spans and time available, and eating them was just as satisfying as if we had started from scratch hours before. It was our Grandmother thing, and we loved it.
The cookies, coupled with the tea party Poppa K fixed for us, made an ordinary evening special without making much mess nor taking much time.
Kids spend more time with the television than they do with their parents, their teachers, their studies or play, yet there is nothing children or parents need more than time with one another. Almost any skill we learn must be developed over time, takes lots of repeated efforts and experience to become polished, and requires lots of personal, focused, and patient attention from adults.
Making cookies — a simple enough activity — gives opportunities to just talk, to interact with materials, to explore tastes, make decisions, make choices, develop small muscles, to learn vocabulary, to create, to build self-confidence, self-esteem, to feel valued, build relationships, problem solve, to learn about doing for others, share family history-built memories. The list is endless.
The “Grandmother thing” our grannies did was invest their time in us; they were never “too busy.” It was an investment they made in our futures, knowing what we seem to forget — that time is all we have to give that really matters.
Darby Kethan has a master's degree in child development, and has experience as a social worker, educator of young children, educational consultant, and as a professional trainer for a national educational foundation providing professional development to teachers. Visit her website at darbykethan.com.
