THE MANY FACES OF CORRUPTION

It’s official, after a year, my daughter and her five children have moved to their own home. Ariana has been building it for a year now.

The carpet cleaners are coming to clean my seriously dirty carpets that were once a fresh clean cream color. Or were they? Hmm, it’s been so long I can’t remember.

My carpets have been fingernail polished, cleaned with bleach, peed on, bled on, had food dumped on them and finally at Christmas, Tristan shot them with a toy paint gun that I hope had toy paint.

I have been organizing and cleaning the house and repainting many of the walls. Tristan turned two while they lived here and became very artistic with a pen. His canvas of choice, when he was disenchanted with the walls, were the windowsills and doors. What was I thinking when I chose to have them painted with an oil base paint.

That boy gets around. When bored, he liked to hammer things into my hardwood floors.Was it any wonder then that I finally caved and did what any sane, seriously busy grandma would do, I let them watch television.

I realized the other day that maybe TV watching had gone a little overboard when Kaden, my 9 year old grandson came rushing into my bedroom.

“Grandma, can you call mom and ask her to bring home some Sudafed for kids?”

“Why, are you sick?”

He gave his lopsided sheepish grin. “No.”

“Why do you want some then?”

“It helps a kid feel more like a kid.”

OK, these kids were definitely getting too much on screen entertainment. I should have paid more attention when we were watching a movie together and they didn’t want to fast forward through the commercials.

They never had television at home except for movies once or twice a week and now, just so evil grandma had time to do nonessential things—like breathe—their minds were twisted by commercial television. And I mean really twisted. I caught them fast-forwarding the cartoons to re-watch the commercials.

Lucky thing Ariana was getting them away from my corrupting influence. I hope she can clean their minds as easily as I can clean the walls and carpets.