Poop Shute

My Grandma

When I was little, and living in the suburbs of Chicago, my grandparents lived across the street. Naturally, they used to babysit for us a lot. Both my parents worked, so after school I would just go to hang out with grandma until 5ish when mom and/or dad came to get me and my little brother.

Sometimes my parents would go out for a date night, and so we would spend the night over with grams and gramps. My brother and I would share a double air mattress, and inevitably he'd hog the covers and I'd hog the bed. By morning I would be sprawled across the middle and shivering while he was smashed into the wall, snug as a bug in a very small rug.

My grandma is a notorious troublemaker, and used to have fun getting us riled up. I wonder now if we were unwitting pawns in a power struggle between patriarch and matriach, but she made sure we had fun, so we didn't care.

My favorite example involves ice cream.

My grandma has a pretty big sweet tooth. Sometimes... Scratch that. Most of the time that we spent the night over their for date nights my grandma would take the opportunity to use my brother and I as a means to an end. She taught us a chant that is near and dear to my heart, to this day:

I SCREAM! YOU SCREAM! WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM!

She would instigate us by chanting it herself and lead us in a march around the coffee table in the living room. Sometimes she'd even give us props, like wooden spoons and pots to bang on. This would go on until my grandfather would grunt and groan his way out of his easy chair and drive us all to Baskin Robbins. Sometimes I wonder if he let us go on for a while just because it was funny, or if he really was resisting in favor of laziness.

If I remember right, I think my mom told me she used to use this chant back when my mom and aunts were little too. It's apparently a family tradition at this point. Well, who am I to break tradition? I look forward to one day parading my own kids and subsequent grandkids around to coerce their mother into letting us all go out for ice cream.

Good times.