Sure, I’ll Take the Kids for a Few Days

For months, we had anticipated their visit: a fun-filled week at home with my two nephews from Northern California--one 4 years old, the other 7 months--while my brother and his wife took a short anniversary trip.

My girls dreamed of taking the baby for walks and carting him around to show off to their friends. They planned to teach the 4-year-old to swim, to play soccer, to ride a bike. We’d have family outings--five kids and me--to the beach, the zoo and Chuck E. Cheese’s.

But the rigors of outings with car seats and stroller and diaper bag made our trips few and far between. The baby was happiest at home, crawling around the living room floor, stuffing bits of paper in his mouth and trying to aggravate the dogs. And his brother wanted to play baseball, not soccer, pronounced pool water “too tickly” to swim in, and preferred California Pizza Kitchen to Chuck E. Cheese’s.

“He doesn’t want to do anything we want to do,” my 11-year-old complained, as he led her outside by the hand for another round of baseball on our front lawn. “He can’t have everything his way!”

On his visit last summer when he was 3, he had run behind her and her older sisters wherever they went, delighting in his cousins’ antics, following their dictates gleefully. Now, at 4, he purposefully dawdles, greets every request with a question (“Why?”), and devotes his boundless energy to fashioning his own identity.

“He’s just like you girls at that age,” I tell her, recalling the hours I’d spent playing Barbies, watching cartwheels, pushing 4-year-olds on swings. Now, as reality clashed with their fantasies, my daughters felt that sense of responsibility. And I, from the perspective of indulgent aunt, could enjoy the luxury of memories.

The work seemed more tedious. I was impatient as I scrubbed juice stains from the carpet, collected dirty socks and sippy cups and teething rings, plucked plastic dinosaurs from the pile of trash on the kitchen floor.

But I am more tolerant. I can enjoy these kids in ways I couldn’t enjoy my own. I don’t invest each moment with such significance that I live in fear of doing something wrong. It’s not just that they’re not mine to mold, but that I realize now how resilient children are. So it doesn’t bother me all that much when the baby fusses. I know he’s tired of sitting, but he can wait to be picked up until I finish making his brother’s lunch. He’ll sleep better once he’s exercised his lungs. And he won’t remember this when he’s grown.

Likewise, I am not embarrassed by the idiosyncrasies of a 4-year-old. When he picks clothes that don’t match, asks me to polish his nails, refuses to join neighbor kids in a game, insists on wearing his hair plastered to his head with gobs of gel ... that’s not a commentary on my management, just a 4-year-old being 4.

And if my new attitude frees him, it liberates me as well. I don’t feel compelled to answer every “Why?” with some sort of rational explanation, when “because I said so” fits the bill.

I was supposed to keep them on a schedule, follow the rules, adhere to routines. The 4-year-old “needs to go to bed by 8:30,” my brother advised. “He gets up at 7 and if he doesn’t get enough sleep, he’ll get cranky.” He needs a bedtime story to fall asleep, and the baby should be rocked before he’s put down.

The list of warnings, needs and requirements seemed endless ... as did the patient explanations. Didn’t they remember I’d done this three times over?

I felt insulted ... and then sheepish, thinking back to when I was in my brother’s shoes. I realized how overbearing I was the first time I left my girls with relatives. Their dad and I had taken them to Ohio, then left them with his folks and took a weekend trip. And I left my mother-in-law a list of instructions--three lists, actually, typewritten, one for each girl--detailing everything from how often they needed to go to the bathroom to what they should eat for breakfast. I recall my mother-in-law rolling her eyes as she put the lists aside. “We’ll do fine, won’t we, girls?” she said. And as we drove away, I cried.

What my children remember from those visits has nothing to do with routines I prescribed. Their grandma’s house was always noisy and full of kids. They learned to shoot pool and catch lightning bugs, stayed up past midnight watching movies, had biscuits with honey for breakfast in Grandma’s bed. “And she didn’t even care about the crumbs,” they still marvel.

It was me tossing out routines this time around. I hope the kids don’t tell, but I let the baby have pancakes for breakfast and sleep curled up in my arms at night. His brother stayed up until 11 and slept until 9. He had doughnuts for breakfast and cocoa before bed. We didn’t touch the pile of books he brought; he fell asleep to SpongeBob on TV, with his cousins alongside.

Now that the week has ended and the boys are gone, our house has begun to settle down. And their house is in chaos, no doubt, as my brother and his wife try to deal with the remnants of our unscheduled-ness.

But we did our job, the girls and I. The baby may not have slept enough or eaten on time; his brother wasn’t read to, didn’t learn to swim or ride a bike. But they made a week’s worth of memories at Aunt Sandy’s house. And that’s what vacations are for, after all.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.