I'm Better Online

The Best Laid Plans
2008

I'm not such a great grandma. . . I'm a great planner. (The blog Oma is better than the live one.) I am the first to admit that sitting alone with an idea book is easier than picking up 500 wooden beads after a toddler drops the baggie. Some of my weekend reality checks:

1. One sick little girl just missed her mom. She wasn't the least bit interested in my button collection or anything else in my overflowing bag of tricks.
   
2. I was enthusiastically reciting my well-practiced "Once upon a time, in a nursery rhyme..." chant when three bottles of root beer spilled all over the couch. "Cha-Cha..."
   
3. After I spent two tedious, useless hours over a minuscule boondoggle instruction book, my son came and showed me how to do it in ten minutes.
4. The cookie cutters and sprinkles were silently tucked away, and I opened a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints.
5. My grandkids will remember take-out pizza instead of home-canned peaches.

I'm a wannabe.

In his office, Dee has a picture called The Salon Tiroler, by Franz von DeFregger. (He's a genre painter in the style of Norman Rockwell.) The guy in the bright green jacket is all decked out like a genuine mountain climber, in his brand-new, spotless duds, regaling the real Tyrolers with his well-researched tales. They're in worn-out leather pants, sporting feathers from pheasants they shot themselves, smoking the pipes they carved. He talks the talk, but they walk the walk.

You, my bloggie buddies, get my Norman Rockwell version of myself, while my grandkids get a stick figure drawing. I'm better in my imagination. While I totally enjoy making all my plans, the actual activity has an added measure of chaos. In other words:

I'd be a great Oma if it weren't for all these kids!

How do your well-laid plans turn out?