What did you do on your summer vacation?

Randi Kreiss

All that’s left is the muddy ring around my bathtub.

Last week, my grandchildren, 5 and 7, fled the 91-degree heat and humidity of south Florida for the even hotter and more humid dog days of August in New York.
These kids had never slept away from home without their parents, so it was a big deal, separation-wise, that they were here for a week.

That is, their mom had to let the ties stretch across the 1,500 miles that separated her from the children for seven days. She did well; the kids did great. My son drowned his loneliness with back-to-back days of fishing.

I needn’t have worried about the kids. On the second day of his visit here, Jacob, the 5-year-old, asked, “What does my daddy look like?” Only two days and my son’s imprint in his kids’ lives was fading. Maybe Jacob is an outta sight, outta mind kind of fellow.

My mission was to keep them super busy so they wouldn’t get homesick; however, the concomitant piece of that was I had to be super busy, too. A sampling of our activities: Central Park Zoo, Chinatown for dim sum lunch, Long Island Children’s Museum, Grant Park, North Woodmere Park, numerous ice cream parlors and pizza places and visits to three different beach clubs. At home we cooked complex meals like franks in blankets, picked tomatoes in full farmer regalia, ran through sprinklers and rode bikes up and down the block.

What I noticed most was the amplified vibration in my house. How quiet my home has become over the past years. Now, for a week, kids were pounding on the piano, Sabrina was roller-skating up and down the hallway, and at night there were softly told bedtime stories and light footsteps in the upstairs hall again.

One bedtime, I was telling them a favorite story when Jacob started fidgeting. “You have to go?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Can you hit pause?”

What I loved most, besides hanging with sweaty little boys and energizer 7-year-olds, was their over-the-top, wildly extreme enthusiasm about everything. Eating on the porch? The best thing that ever happened in their lives. Sprinkles on their ice cream? Unforgettable! Ralph’s Italian ices? An out-of-body experience.