“It has its pleasures, believe me, but we were also glad when they’d go to bed at night,” says Hrankowski. “You try to keep up with them, but it’s impossible.”
What about the adage that kids keep you young? “I tell you, I don’t feel any younger. It’s hard, mentally and physically,” he says.
The former labourer had been retired for four months when he returned to childrearing. His wife kept her office job to help cover expenses. They bought bunk beds for their three-bedroom home. Savings disappeared.
Plans for leisurely days and post-retirement trips were replaced by evenings trying to figure out modern math, chauffeuring to hockey, soccer and dance lessons, and dealing with the kids’ emotional upheaval. “The response we always got from friends was `I don’t know how you do it.'”
Hrankowski has a heart condition. He says his health issues are hardest on the kids.
Buxton and her husband Brian Philcox, 71, are also conscious of how their age and health affects their grandchildren’s security. Buxton is a breast cancer survivor. She was diagnosed and went through treatment shortly after Kenny and Vicky moved in. Philcox had a quadruple bypass in 2006. That sense of mortality means they see every day as a gift, but are also acutely aware not to take it for granted.
“It’s very complex and something that’s with us all the time, but you can’t spend your lives worrying about what’s going to happen,” says Buxton.
It was a hot Saturday in June 2003 when the couple arrived home from a four-week trip to Australia and New Zealand to find Kenny and Vicky, 18 months apart and both still in diapers, waiting for them. The children’s mother had gone through a devastating breakup with her partner and couldn’t cope. So she left the kids with their aunt, who had been house-sitting.
Philcox had retired from his career in marketing and communications; Buxton is a freelance journalist and author who has written widely about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which results from prenatal exposure to alcohol. They had moved from a home in Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood, where they raised two adopted daughters, to their retirement dream home in Scarborough.
“By September, we realized we were in it for the long haul,” says Buxton.
Kenny got the coat room. Vicky got the dressing room, though most nights she’d arrive at her grandparents’ bed in the dark and end up curled between them.
They’ve been in the fray ever since, making last-minute dashes to buy Valentine’s Day cards for the class, remembering to return library books, booking doctor’s appointments, filling out school forms. Their backyard pool is a blessing. So was subsidized child care provided by the City of Toronto in the early years.
But the energy reserve isn’t quite what it used to be.
“The minute we get them into bed, I’m in bed or we conk out on the couch watching TV,” says Buxton. During the kids’ frequent overnight visits with their mother, the grandparents don’t go out dancing or socializing; they flop.
