A visit with the grandparents is not just fun and games

On Sunday, Sandbridge. On Monday, pool and movie.

On Tuesday, Busch Gardens. On Wednesday, pool again, plus stories and game night.

This busy schedule - with more to come - is the invention of a group of local grandmothers to entertain visiting grandchildren.

They've planned an entire week of fun, games and life lessons.

About 10 to 15 years ago, about a dozen couples, some of them friends in New York, moved to Virginia Beach and the surrounding area. Slowly, they all retired from their various careers. Their children, grown and gone by then and with families of their own, began sending their children to visit the grandparents each summer.

It was all fine and good until the grandmothers, who belonged to the same book club, began exulting the joys and lamenting the headaches of entertaining these lively youngsters when they visited here in drips and trickles all summer long.

And then somebody at one of their meetings - they call themselves The Literary Circle of Friends - suggested that they ask their children to send the grandkids all at once.

"I believe it was Harriett," said Rosalyn Neal, a retired teacher and guidance counselor at Bayside Junior High School. "It would be a week of our choosing. We spoke to our children about it, and all of them were delighted."

Harriett McLaughlin's brainstorm struck everyone as sheer genius.

They could pool their resources and energies and rely on each other to come up with one weeklong extravaganza. The granddads could help with the driving, the supervising and the life guarding at each other's pools, and man the grills at group cookouts.

It would be a wholesome, meaningful, memorable experience in bonding and fun for everyone. And it would allow the grandparents to band, support their children and guide their grandchildren.

That was nine summers ago. Over the years, the weeks have been full of activities to suit the kids, ages 2 to 1 8, swim parties, museums, the zoo, skate parties and sleepovers; quiet afternoons of reading, or lively hours of wall-climbing, mini-golf and bowling. The children have made jewelry and scrapbooks, had cooking lessons and table-setting instruction, and enjoyed dressing up for old-fashioned tea parties complete with makeup, fancy hair dos, and finger sandwiches and tea cakes on good china.

The ties between the grandparents and the grandchildren have strengthened, and friendships have developed between the young visitors, who hail from Maryland, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan.

A highlight every year is storytelling night, when many of the grandparents share their personal experiences during the civil rights movement.

"The kids are fascinated and get to ask questions," Neal said. "It's really great for us, too."

On Wednesday evening, about 25 children were draped all over the furniture and floor of Larry and Audrey Boatswain's home in southern Virginia Beach.

They listened intently to what it felt like to be turned away from restaurants that did not serve blacks, to be refused entrance to all-white movie theaters, and to how moving it was to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The discussion veered from discrimination and civil rights to messages sent by certain styles of dress, what it takes to be successful in corporate America, and how important it is find happiness and satisfaction in a career without letting choices be driven by financial greed.

Curtiss Church, 15, sat on the sofa with sunglasses on. At one point, he squirmed as the grandparents, including his grandparents Jean and Albert Church, suggested that his preference for baggy clothing might cause him to be judged negatively.

"It's a lot more comfortable hearing it from grandparents," he said later when the group broke up for snacks, Chinese checkers, Scrabble and Password. "Grandparents are people you get comfort from. They've been through it, so they give better input and stuff."

The next day, Thursday, brought bowling, skating and dinner at a buffet. A sleepover that night sent the boys to one house, the girls to another.

Today, this summer's Grandparent's Week ends with a final pool party at Carole Jackson's house. Some of the children's parents, and even some great-grandparents, will arrive to pick up the kids and take them home.

But first, on a big deck around the pool, they'll enjoy the grand finale: a potluck dinner and a talent show during which the kids recite poems or perform dances they choreographed themselves.

Every year, the grandmothers ham it up in costume. To the delight of the grandkids, they've sung like the Supremes, pranced like Tina Turner or put on a Chaka Khan review.

"They're not going to believe what we have this year," McLaughlin said. "We're keeping it a big secret."

Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2732, krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com