Making Christmas memories one wrestling match at a time

For his own safety, we had to separate Ty from his little brother and his cousin Christmas Day.

To be precise, it was for the safety of his toys, but we still had to set up a barricade to keep Nolan and Aiden at bay.

We also had to separate their fathers at one point — and separate them from me — but that was nothing new.

Just consider it passing along an old family tradition to a new generation, like a fruitcake recipe — or the actual fruitcake itself.

As with birthdays and other holidays, we held Ty’s presents hostage to get him to eat his dinner first.

That’s fine when it’s his birthday party, but for Christmas, that meant that all of us had to wait to tear into our presents — just one of the sacrifices we’re forced to make for our grandchildren.

The Christmas festivities wrapped up a week for us with our middle grandson, Aiden, who stayed with us after his parents’ Army Reserve unit Christmas party the weekend before Christmas.

That might have been the best Christmas present we got this year — and we didn’t even have to unwrap it.

He’s still at the age, though, where we did unwrap more than a few surprise packages from him during the week.

Fortunately, the latest news from his parents is that Aiden is beginning the toilet training process, so we are hopeful that, by the time he comes back for his next visit, he will have completed his training successfully and that kind of surprise package will be a thing of the past.

That’s just another of the traditions that we’re glad to pass on to the next generation.

Aiden did continue to show his proclivity for gourmet experimentation while with us. For instance, we took him out to one of the local fast-food places one night where we got him a chicken nugget kid’s meal.

We picked that for him because we’ve ordered it for him before and he’s eaten it. However, I’m sure it won’t be too much longer before he won’t be letting us order for him, so we’re still doing it for him while we can.

We got him the apple slices with caramel sauce to go with his chicken nuggets. Aiden dipped the first apple slice in the caramel sauce and proceeded to lick the sauce off, then stick the apple slice back in the container.

He then picked up one of the chicken nuggets and decided to dip that in the caramel sauce. Apparently, he liked it, because he proceeded to dip the rest of his nuggets in the sauce and ate them all that way. Next time, we’ll tell them just to keep the apple slices and give us the nuggets with the caramel dipping sauce.

While he was trying new taste combinations, he also went back to some of his old favorites — he quickly found the dog food container and was soon nibbling on a few chunks. We made sure to keep that out of his reach the rest of the weekend — it’s expensive enough buying dog food for our two four-legged eaters, we don’t need to pay for it for a two-legged eater as well.

We had to play keep Aiden away on Christmas Day as well, but this time it was keeping him away from Ty’s new train set.

Once we had finally gotten Ty to eat some dinner — more than enough to suit him, barely enough to suit his parents — we were out in the living room, passing the presents around.

Ty had enough to keep him busy unwrapping, and Aiden was doing a good job on his pile, but Ty’s little brother Nolan didn’t seem too interested.

I tried to get Nolan to rip open his packages, but he seemed more inclined to make present-opening a spectator rather than a participator sport — which left me to open all his presents for him, a duty I reluctantly took on.

Ty got a train set with plenty of accessories and, of course, he had to set it up right away. We cleared away a space in the dining room and he and I got them up and running, but it wasn’t long before they drew his cousin Aiden’s attention.

As they were a little advanced for a 20-month-old, the adults spent a little while herding Aiden back into the living room, over and over again, before Terry finally created a barricade with a couple of chairs and a baby gate.

Fortunately, we diverted Aiden and Nolan with their new toys, so Ty and I were left in peace to play railroad tycoon in the dining room.

That was, until the two big kids in the place — his father and his uncle — got into a wrestling match over Alex’s gag gift for his older brother.

In a foolhardy attempt to save our little railroad, I made the mistake of trying to break them up and proceeded to get flattened in the middle.

It just means I can’t wait until Ty, Aiden and Nolan start wrestling each other. That, I think, I might be able to break up.