Mickey Mouse. My longtime helper, Mae, would watch the kids while I made dinner. Watching the kids was made easier by such television programs as The Mickey Mouse Club. If I have heard that theme song once, I have heard it a thousand times. I am not complaining, Mickey Mouse was a great babysitter. Even Stephen, our third son, who was in a play pen at the time, would dance up and down. To give you an idea of how involved kids can get in such shows, once Herman and I noticed Michael was getting ready to smash the television set with a guitar or a baseball bat (I can’t remember which) and we stopped him just in time. When we asked
But it doesn’t always work, on one trip to Blum’s Department Store both boys promised to be very good. I don’t think we were in the store more than a couple of minutes when Mae and I had to make a U turn and get them right out of there. Michael had stepped onto the Down escalator by himself and Mae got him off just in time. Both of them kept running to the escalator. They scared me and I must have scared them because they both screamed and carried on. We finally had to drag them out of the store. They cried themselves to sleep in the car on the way home. We lived in our little row house in Chester, Pennsylvania for eight years. All four of our chil- dren – Frank, Michael, Stephen and Wendy – were born in those years. The kids seemed to come in two shifts, first Frank and Michael, then a few years later, Stephen and Wendy. So for about a decade I was having and raising babies.
Frank and Mike on Halloween
HOW I RAISED THE KIDS WITHOUT LOSING MY MIND
Erma Bombeck was a very popular newspaper columnist who wrote humor- ous stories about raising children and domestic situations. She once wrote a column about herself that described how hectic it was to raise kids and to handle all the things that happen. She said that after some years of being totally involved with her growing children, she and her husband were invited to a grand banquet of some sort. She was very excited and read up on all the current issues to prepare for some real adult conversation. She said everything was going well, she was holding up her end of conver- sation very nicely, and getting back into habit of being with adults. Unfortunate- ly some part of her brain was still with the kids and she suddenly noticed that she was cutting the meat on the plate of the man next to her at dinner. Every mother will recognize the feeling. One child keeps you busy, with four kids it’s a whole different game. I had two great helpers raising the kids in those years – Mae Gibson and
142
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator