Grampy Park

My Dad is 79 years old so for him to have a 7 year old granddaughter (he has four other granddaughters ranging from 14 - 22 years old) has been really fun. My daughter called him Grammy Daddy when she was younger so she could differentiate him from Grammy Mommy. She has recently started to call him Grampy because she is grown up as she tells me. Anyway, he and I try to come up with activities that he can do with my daughter so she can have a special relationship with him. She has hammered a lot of nails and "sawed" a lot of wood at his workbench (as my nieces and my siblings and I did before her) but we really wanted to find some activities that we could do outside with him. Hiking with Grampy has been a lot of fun. The most important component of a good hike as Grampy tells us is the walking stick that each person selects before the hike actually begins. Can I tell you how many "walking sticks" I have had in my house, in the car, in the basement, in my daughter's room, and on the porch?....no I can't because it must be somewhere in the hundreds! And I would like to add that I always find really cool ones but have to give them to my daughter - another Mom thing no one warned me about. Since Dad is getting older we decided to try some other less strenuous activities. Turns out that flying a kite fits nicely into the less strenuous category. We found this big open grass field near Grampy's house to try out our beautiful (I use that term very very loosely)Dora kite. It was indeed windy enough for a kite to fly but for some reason I completely forgot how to make a kite get up and stay up. Not Grampy though - he counseled us through every step - when the wind was right, how long the tail needed to be, the fact that you really don't need to run to get the kite in the air you just need "to read the wind correctly". You can imagine how a 7 year old and her Mom took that little tidbit while running aimlessly all over that field trying to get Dora in the air. With Grampy's direction we did get Dora to fly but not to the moon just maybe to the couple of trees that she fell into....The best part of the experience happened a few days later. As my daughter and I drove past the field on the way to visit my parents she said, "look Mom there's Grampy Park"! The memories I was trying to create for my daughter with my Dad were right there as simple as Grampy Park.