"We Can Fix This"

A couple weeks ago, I commandeered daughter Cookie's kitchen island for Operation Homework and enlisted kids from grades 2, 3, 5, and 7 to take down the enemy before the bedtime ambush. Although it was a maneuver I had grown rusty at, our mission garnered some modest success over the week and a half I was there, and we enjoyed a lot of good fun and conversation in the process.

On one night in particular, Bootsie (who had celebrated her ninth birthday only a few days before) was going head to head with some grammar, generating some discussion of sentence subjects, direct objects, and the like. Her assignment involved some parsing and diagramming, and she was having a little trouble determining the roles and relationships among nouns in a given sentence. I watched as she wrote an object in the subject spot.

We talked about the different ways verbs work, and how some nouns denote "doers" while others designate "receivers."  She realized her mistake, erased it, corrected it, and looked thoughtfully up at me.

"You know," she said, "some people just say, 'Oh look. You did that wrong, didn't you?'"

"Really?" I asked, thinking she might be referring to me. "What would I say?"

A few seconds of thoughtful silence, and then this: "You would say, 'We can fix this.'" She caught me off-guard.

Right off the top of my head, I can't recall many times when anything anyone said made me feel better than these simple, sincere words from this new nine-year-old. I love that someone might see my efforts in this positive way. I like the thought that someone might look to me for hope, for reassurance, for ways out of tough spots, for companionship when problems need solving.

So here I sit, a full, unprecedented twenty-four days late with birthday-blog wishes for this sweet kid. Although busy may be a reason, it does not hold up as an excuse. There is a problem here, and I must fix this. Now.

Happy birthday, Bootsie. In the chaotic whirlwind that blew in with a new baby brother, you slipped quietly from eight years old to nine. In spite of that, though, there were presents and cake (twice) and lots of good thoughts that were just for you. You got toys, activity kits, and costumes to feed your creative spirit, and I was glad to arrive while the celebration was still ongoing and fresh. I can't wait to return in a few days for Halloween.

Your great-grandma and I are proud to see that you are hand-stitching quilt blocks from these squares of fabric she gave you.

Don't get frustrated, though, if you find a row of stitching that is crooked or coming loose. Don't worry if the pattern doesn't turn out quite like you intended. As you are finding out, everything doesn't always come together smoothly, especially right off the bat. Some of the things you want to accomplish take a lot of time.

So be patient with yourself, and stay positive. Like all of us, you are bound to make a few mistakes along the way. But when that happens, just remind yourself, "We can fix this"-- and then try your best to do just that.

Packee

I had forgotten how it feels to hold a newborn baby. After all, nearly six years had gone by since the last new grandkid, and my mind had moved on from nursery rhymes to The Hardy Boys and from first steps to dance steps. By every indication, it seemed safe to dispense with the baby toys, the high chair, the toddler bed.

But as it turns out, the sweet song of little people in my life plays on. At the bottom of this page of music, a repeat sign has magically appeared. Baby Packee, born at 8:37 a.m. on Sept. 30, is adding another verse and his own variation to the familiar melody of the past twelve years. I have just returned home from a ten-day stay with him and his family as we all adjust to a family dynamic so dramatically (but joyfully) changed.

Baby Packee joins four adoring siblings who at present clamor and compete to hold him. Below, on the night he was born, Zoomie gets the honors as Sooby, Pooh, and Bootsie look on.

Since then, everyone has had plenty of turns, including me. This photo, taken right before I left to come home five days ago, pretty well verifies that I still have my knack for baby-holding and assures Packee's place as suitable subject matter for "Googie's Attic."

A few friends have asked me how I chose "Packee" as the blog nickname for this seventh addition to Googie's cast of characters. In the case of his siblings, I have always added a double-o to the first letter of their real names to form the nicknames used to reference them in the blog. So when it happened that this baby's first name begins with the same letter as that of his brother "Pooh," I had a hard time coming up with another name beginning P-O-O. (Think about it--the options are not too promising.)

So I decided to include the double-e pattern from the names of his cousins Beenie and Heero and to position those letters at the end of the word. Since the baby's real-life initals are P.A.C., I determined I could add a "k" and call him "Packee." Not only does this honor his real initials, but it also honors a TV character I loved as a child in the late 1950s--Packy Lambert. Packy, played by Roger Mobley, was in the cast of the Saturday morning TV show Fury, a series about a beautiful black horse living on a ranch in California.

Our little Packee is three weeks old today. He arrived five days before his sister Bootsie's ninth birthday, which was pretty well eclipsed by his arrival. I am late with her birthday blog, I know, but maybe she will be so busy with her new little brother that she won't notice.