Tonight with Evan

Tonight I was taking care of my six year old grandson while his parents were busy at meetings.

It was pretty easy.  He worked on a computer game, trying to better his score while I read a letter from my pen pal in France and started writing a reply to put in her Christmas card.  We were so busy with our own tasks I almost forgot his bed time!  Bad grandmother, we were ten minutes late getting started.

He did all the tasks he had to do.  We fed the fish.  He ate his granola snack.  He changed into his pajamas and brushed his teeth.  He helped me lock the two cats, Brodie and Dante, in the basement.  Then we sat and read four books.  He read two to me, I read two to him.  I am so impressed with his reading skills.  He reads with emphasis in all the right places.  He understands the flow of the words across the page.  Perhaps a future writer?

Then it was time for him to be in bed, but he popped up almost immediately to tell me he was afraid to go to sleep because of something he had seen in the movie.  Well, I could understand that because I used to have the same kinds of thoughts when I was young...still do, sometimes.  The trick is to think about something pleasant.

He thought it would be pleasant to play a computer game.  I thought not.

Instead, I told him how I put his daddy to bed when he was a boy.  Did he play computer games, too? he asked.  No, I said, he never did, because there were no computer games.  They hadn't been invented yet.

This astonishing fact was just settling in when his daddy came back from his meeting to tell his son goodnight.  I'm sure Evan went to sleep thinking about that amazing pre-computer world.