Joy




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Joy

   So as if I weren't blessed enough with one wonderful daughter, suddenly I have two. Joy arrived 18 months later and proceeded to make our cups runneth over. Joy was a living doll from day one and decided early in life that she was aptly named.

   Since her older sister was the studious, responsible one, Joy decided to become the clown of the family. A gifted mimic, she began trying to make us laugh from the day she learned to talk, Joy was always able to bring a smile to any situation.

   I remember being very upset with her for whatever reason at an early age, when she interrupted my tirade with a question...."Daddy, I was just wondering, they keep going to the moon....why don't they ever go to the sun?"

So, I patiently explained that the sun was too hot, etc, etc, and she looked at me and said, "Well, they could go at night."

   She knew full well what she was doing.....just trying to make me laugh to relieve the tension of the moment, but it became increasingly difficult to bawl her out for anything, because she would always sieze the moment to crack me up.

Can you tell that this little girl.....

.....is this little girl's mother.

Joy became Lori's little partner in crime and the two of them would dig and poke and explore every cranny of their lives, exploring and learning together.

From the time Joy was able to walk, she exhibited a tendency to be rather obstinate. I clearly remember a small carnival the four of us attended when Joy was just old enough to toddle along by herself. She kept wandering off at every opportunity....and I mean off. She would take off at the fastest speed she could muster and didn't bother looking back. She really didn't much care if anyone was following or not....she was going to see the world, even if it was only 100 feet wide at the moment.

My father gave me some terribly good advice when Joy was born. "Phil," he said, "from now on, they're going to make you become the umpire for every situation, so teach them early. If there's a piece of cake to be divided or a morsel of food to be split or a soda to be poured, they'll yell and whine like crazy...."she got more than I did." Do yourself a favor and make them settle things the old-fashioned way. One does the dividing.....the other gets first choice"

Well, from that moment on, that's the way it was in our house. Lori would take 20 minutes to cut a piece of cake in half....with compasses and sextants and weights and whatever else she could find, then Joy would take twenty minutes deciding which was the bigger piece, using all the same instruments Lori had used. Their mother and I would just sit and laugh at them, but they were dead serious about it. The only argument we had to settle was who's turn it was to do the dividing and who's turn it was to get first choice. (We never did learn how to get out of that one.)

It was always our policy to never punish the girls when you were mad at them; anger does not induce rational thinking, so I always put it off until the heat of the moment had cooled. (The girls will tell you otherwise; they spin tales of a room dripping with the viseral of their blood-stained backs dripping down the walls and whips hanging on hooks, but they also tell their friends they were raised by wolves, so don't believe anything they say.)

Anyway, I can remember stopping them in mid-(insert sin here) and telling them...."OK, remind me before you go to bed, you both have a spanking coming!!" Well, of course, for the remainder of the day, they would tip-toe past me, never failing to tell me how much they loved me etc, but when they kissed me goodnight and headed up the steps, I would remind them of their transgression, whereupon they would both burst into tears and swear to never do it again (whatever 'it' was) and all it would take was a gentle smack to the backside and they would cry and hug me and toddle off to bed. (Now that I think of it, that could be construed as emotional abuse or mental terrorism, couldn't it?......poor little tikes.)

It always used to bother me the way their Mother would use me as her punishing stick........come home from work, and Mom had sent them to their room for one thing or another, and I'd hear "I want you to go up there and kill both those children!!" Well, I'd spent the whole day looking forward to seeing them again....I had no inclination toward spanking them.

So I'd go up to their room and the three of us would put on this big show of me spanking them and they would cry and all of us were snickering under our breath and the girls would come back downstairs pretending they'd just gotten a terrible beating, all forelorn and contrite. I think that was the beginning of their acting careers.

Anyway, those two little darlings are all grown up now and only remember bits and pieces, but they sure don't remember it the way I do. They could not have been more fun to raise than they were. I'm not sure how they view it, but I have never had a more exciting or rewarding experience than watching the two of them grow up.

They are enjoying their own children growing up at the moment, and I can only hope they are getting as much enjoyment out of it as I did raising them. And I certainly hope their kids remember it.....memories can be so fleeting. Until you reach my age, then they all come flooding back.

Dani