By Phyllis McCrossin

It’s Sunday evening and the trailer is quiet. Too quiet — or, maybe not.

It’s been a busy 10 days.

There is a reason people don’t generally have children after 40. They are quite exhausting.

OK. That’s exhausting in a good way, but still exhausting.

King and I have started our winter babysitting duties. That is to say every other week we don our grandparenting capes and take charge of our twin 8-year-old grandsons. Our not-quite divorced daughter and her soon-to-be-ex have joint custody – 50/50 — one week with her, one week with him. They make it work.

(Good for them, right?) She remains unencumbered, he has a new live-in. You can blame COVID for part of the two-year delay in her freedom.

I’m not so certain our daughter truly looks forward to having us descend on her for six months of the year – other than the fact that she is extremely grateful for the day care help we provide. As a real estate agent, her hours can be unpredictable.

King and I will brave two-hour commutes in shit-show California traffic to help her out. (Normal commute time from our campground to her home is 45 minutes. We’d stay closer if we could, but campgrounds in her area have an age limit for trailers. Ours is too old to get in).

Now, I can drive (and have driven), in California traffic if I have to, but I’ll be honest – if given the choice between standing naked in the freezing cold and scraping the windshield with a credit card or driving in six lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic with motorcyclists zipping between cars – I’ll take the former. King drives and I sit in the passenger seat and make the appropriate noises.

Our job is to make ourselves available to pick up our grandsons after school and babysit until our daughter can get off from work. It’s something we happily do.

When we are not in California the boys go to an (expensive) after school program, but now that Grandma and Poppa are here, they have indicated they would rather go home after school.

Now, I have had the pleasure of picking up and dropping off grandchildren in the past. King has been on the other end of that endeavor as he was generally the school administrator standing outside overseeing the chaos. And it is chaos. When we lived in Alma, I watched as entitled parents in their SUVs actually drove across the school lawn to pick kids up. Not cut corners and drive over a little grass – but actually drive up onto the lawn as if there were a circular driveway in front of the school.

The school here in Carlsbad, Calif., is not much better. There is a round-about about 20 feet before the driveway to the school. King and I have been in line at the time school lets out and we have been there 30 minutes before school lets out. It does not matter — it’s always the same mass confusion.

(The school district the boys attend does not provide school buses. Those California districts that do, charge for the service). Can you imagine 300 parents lined up to pick up their children after school? There are a few children – very few—who live close enough to walk. I’ve walked with the boys once – it took about 20 minutes, but in today’s creepy world, I would never let them walk alone.

So we join the ranks of parents who line up and wait. School gets out at 2:20. By 2 p.m. the line is down the block and almost to the main street a mile away. By 2:15 parents are starting to by-pass the line, drive THROUGH the round-about (as in over the center circle), and cut into the parking lot. I’ve watched it happen all week. After two days I quit complaining to King about the offenders. For his part, I suspect King has probably seen it all anyway.

Then there is also the not-so-small matter that we drive a very large pickup truck. When we finally get to the pick-up zone, the boys have to try to climb into the back seat of a truck with the floor boards that come up to their chests. After the first day when I jumped out of the truck and cupped my hands to give them a leg up into the truck (basically tossing them into the back seat — backpacks and all), the principal no longer lets me get out of the truck to help them. She insists she can lift them in herself. If that is what she wants, fine. My way is much faster and the boys loved it.

So this Friday when we picked the boys up we took them back to the campground with us for a weekend of camping. They dug holes and filled them with water, we ate lots and lots of mini-doughnuts, cooked s’mores over the campfire, played on the playground, hiked the trails and (don’t tell my daughter) stayed up way past their bedtime. When I finally got them settled down for the evening, I would read Harry Potter to them until they fell asleep.

On Saturday the campground hosted a raptor program. A ranger from a neighboring park gave an hour-long lecture on birds of prey. The boys were enthralled. They were able to get up close (but not too close) to a red-tailed hawk, an American kestrel falcon and Great Horned Owl. They actually learned something. So did Grandma.

When our daughter came to get them late this afternoon I had them showered and dressed for her Christmas work party where Santa was going to be present.

Her tail lights were barely out of sight when King took the dog for one last walk and then fell into bed. It’s almost 7:30 Pacific time and I’m fighting to stay awake.

Next week is our “off” week. We are going to need a full seven days to recuperate.