Gramps made his second visit to Nicholas in a little over three months and he brought along Grandma Carol along for the ride. We have to say that playing hooky to see Nicholas is certainly a lot more fun than work and we encourage it of all potential visitors.
Gramps and Carol first met a few moons ago when Gramps was cultivating his clown alter ego Brother Noah at clown college and they have been the best of friends ever since. Or embalmed as the case might be.
‘Ike aku, ‘ike mai, kokua aku, kokua mai. Pela iho la ka nohana ‘ohana is a Hawaiian proverb which is translated recognize others, be recognized, help others, be helped. Such is a family relationship. Hawaiian ‘ohana is very inclusive, so much so that pretty much everyone whether related it or not are considered cousins. In our case, we seem to have settled on Nicholas having a veritable pantheon of proud grandparents and one can never have too many of those!
Either way, Carol is one of the nicest and neatest people you’ll ever meet (and lest we forget Carol’s trainer/owner Mrs Beasley, her veteran dog of the nursing homes and her faithful companion!).
And of course we can’t forget Moby Dodge and the tendency of Gramps’ conversion van which has this tendency to disgorge mighty mountains of goods painstakingly haggled over and acquired via his ubiquitous and ever present network of spies, paid informants, and store managers throughout the greater Daytona Beach area. If there was ever a continuing education course for bargain hunting, Gramps would be the Professor Emeritus! (Raleigh merchants beware…we might well get him training you how to drop prices to 10% of the original sticker in one fell swoop…) Anywho, we now know why Daytona was curiously absent from the list of places suffering from the recession!
But occasionally, Gramps can be caught out and this time we’ll chalk it up to him being a bit tired from the long drive from Port Orange. I really wish we could take credit for it but he was the one who really made it happen when he suggested that we split our party…Gramps and Daddy went off in search of petrol and Mommy, Carol, and Nicholas headed to Golden Corral. You know, it was really like shooting fish in the barrel there…and he knew he’d been had when he saw them sitting at a table and knew that the dinner had already been paid. But if you’re going to make it easy, we won’t complain… 🙂
However, Mommy and Daddy had their own senior moment when they realised that the diaper bag (with Nicholas’ formula!) was miles away at the house. Consider us excited for putting one over on Gramps, eh? 🙂
