Contents

1. Family Stories
2. Family Stories, or Notes about Our Features
   1. Mother’s Approach
   2. Dad’s Approach
   3. Grandmother’s Approach
   4. Grandfather’s Approach
   5. Children’s Approach
3. The Surprise
4. The Assistant
5. Strange Words
6. For the overall development

Family Stories, or Notes about Our Features

(the small narrative in short stories)

Everyone is somewhat similar to each other in our large family. For example, my mother is like my grandmother in figure and my grandfather in sense of humor. Dad has a voice like his father, my other grandfather. I have my mother’s eyes and ears, and I laugh and scratch my head like my father… But each of us has something special, as my grandfather says, the personal features, which manifests itself not in appearance, but in behavior, in a special approach to doing something. Sometimes I noticed that mom and dad were doing the same thing differently, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. One day my grandmother told my parents: “Yes, your approach to many things, your methods of solving problems is different, but the result is simply amazing.” I don’t know if she was talking about repairs or our upbringing or something else, but from that moment I decided to observe the different approaches of my relatives, and this is what I got.

Mother’s Approach

On Saturday, my mother got up early and started cleaning. At first, she thought a little: “cleaning or repair?” She chose the cleaning. Dad was on a business trip for the second day, and mom didn’t want to do repairs without him. Generally speaking, we did repairs about four years ago. But in recent months, my mother constantly did not like something somewhere, and the words “new repair” sounded often. At the next mention of repairs, dad would grab his briefcase and run off to work: he can work in his lab on weekends. In the doorway he usually spoke: “The money is in the nightstand. You can take and repair whatever you want, and I’m happy with everything I have now…”

The cleaning was routine, not general. My mother dusted and mopped the bedroom and living room floors. We did the cleaning ourselves in the nursery room yesterday. My mother said we could clean on Friday during the holidays. We did it all day while my mother was at work. But we did it only when she came and organized the whole process. So we slept, and my mother looked in the nursery and went to wash the kitchen.

“Still, the wallpaper needs to be replaced”, she told herself as she finished mopping the floor. “It’s eight o’clock – the store is already open. I’ll go and buy the wallpaper.” My mother has long looked for new wallpaper for the kitchen at a nearby store. She changed clothes resolutely, but as she went to the door, she remembered that she would not move