It was a Three S’s weekend with the grandsons

Slippin’, slidin’ and sausages — that was Aiden’s weekend with Mee-mee and Poppie.

For those of you who don’t speak Aiden, Mee-mee and Poppie is what Aiden calls his grandparents.

Mee-mee and Poppie have been taking care of Aiden the last few weeks while his mother has been working at the Army Reserve unit she and his father belong to.

Saturday, Aiden’s uncle and aunt threw a party at their country estate and the highlight of the party proved to be a homemade water slide in their side yard — made with a long piece of clear plastic and a garden hose, abetted by generous squirts of dish soap to increase slipperiness.

We hadn’t brought along our swimsuits, but that didn’t faze Aiden. We moved fast enough to get him stripped down to his diaper before we let him take a ride down the slide.

The problem was, he didn’t want to go down by himself. He managed to convince Mee-mee to take a slide with him.

Fortunately, she didn’t strip down to her underwear to accompany him — there’s only so far she’ll go even for one of her grandsons. Instead, she went sliding down with Aiden — not to mention his cousins Ty and Nolan — fully clothed.

It wasn’t long before everybody at the party was asking her why she hadn’t gone to the bathroom before she left the house — including me, and I knew better.

I thought maybe it was just her way of getting out of taking her Saturday night bath, or at least have a little fun while getting it in, but that wasn’t really the case either.

She was just having fun with her grandchildren, which is what being a grandparent should be all about.

She was also discovering — or perhaps reconfirming — that, at her age, getting down may be easy, especially with the help of generous amounts of soap and water, but getting back up is the real challenge. Especially when your clothes are soaked through to the skin.

I was smart enough to grab her camera as soon as she and her grandsons starting sliding and appointed myself the official photographer of the event — the official dry photographer.

We finally got all the kids — big and little — off the slide and on to the food, but by the time we left a few hours later, grandma was still a little damp — and still grinning from ear to ear.

Sunday, she had to work and I was left in charge of Aiden. About noontime, we had to head to one of the little villages near here where they were having their annual fire picnic parade and I had to shoot pictures for the paper.

It’s the second time he’s had to go with me to one of these parades this summer and he hasn’t protested a bit. He started out mesmerized by all the fire trucks, tractors, antique cars and wagons in the parade — he has a fascination with anything with wheels and motors — but I suspect it quickly become another attraction when he learned they throw candy to the crowds at these parades.

It wasn’t a few minutes into the first parade we went to that he started directing me to any stray pieces of thrown candy that I might have missed — and believe me, he didn’t miss any of them.

This Sunday, there was another attraction in the parade — the Milwaukee Brewers racing sausages were part of the parade.

I was busy snapping the Hot Dog and the Polish Sausage as they came down our side of the street when the Polish Sausage stopped in front of Aiden and got him to give him five as I got a priceless picture.

Of course, I don’t want to tell the Polish Sausage that Aiden was probably trying to figure out how he could grab him and stuff into the bag with the rest of his candy, gum and prizes from the parade. The sausage was probably lucky to get away and get back to his races at Miller Park.