The first people in the Jiang family to get up from the kang were Old Lady Miao and Dani. Old Lady Miao never let other people interfere in kitchen matters, for fear that the maids would steal food while she was cooking. She wanted to measure each person's daily food with a ruler, for fear that she would cook too much food.
Dani’s task every morning was to help Old Lady Miao light a fire. After the fire was lit, Old Lady Miao would give her two baby-fisted multi-grain steamed buns. This was their breakfast today.
The coarse grains at that time were not ground as finely as they are today, and they did not taste sweet and delicious. The cornmeal distributed in their village was all ground by their own stone mills. Every household did not have the time to grind the cornmeal finely, and the rice was ground together with the husk without being peeled.
In order to make the steamed buns more filling, a lot of wild vegetables were added inside. It was a hard ball and it got stuck in the throat when eaten, like chewing sand.
Every day when Dani gets the two steamed buns, she puts them in a pot, adds water and cooks them into porridge, which makes them easier to eat. And Sini is still young and can only eat liquid food.
When she thought of her youngest sister, her eyes dimmed. When Si Ni was only one year old, her mother became pregnant again, and her already insufficient milk supply was cut off. How could Grandma Miao be willing to spend five cents a day to buy milk for her granddaughter from a nearby farm? The little girl survived on boiled cornmeal. She was two years old, but looked not much older than her brother who was only a few days old.
However, when she thought that she would be able to go to school after the autumn harvest, she felt a glimmer of hope. After she finished her studies, she would go out to earn money and buy lots of white flour buns for her younger sisters.
Grandma Miao distributed breakfast to her granddaughter and didn't care whether she ate it directly or boiled it into porridge. She still had to cook breakfast for the two pillars of the family.
The cornmeal in the jar is almost gone, and there is still more than a month before the mid-year grain distribution. Fortunately, the old man’s subsidy for next month will arrive in a few days, so he can make it to the day of grain distribution.
While cooking porridge, Old Mrs. Miao was calculating. In addition to the more than 30 yuan allowance from Jiang Cheng every month, the biggest part was the subsidy of 45 kilograms of grain coupons, half a kilogram of meat coupons and two feet of cloth coupons. After calculating the remaining cloth coupons at home, she thought that she could make a few cotton bibs for her grandson, which would be cool to wear in the summer.
Because we never thought that my daughter-in-law would give birth to a grandson at the beginning, the swaddling clothes and clothes prepared at home were all leftovers from Dani and her friends. They were full of patches and the colors had turned pale due to washing.
In the eyes of Old Mrs. Miao, how could her precious grandson use the clothes left over by a few girls? At the beginning, the old couple gave each of the two children of the second family a new set of clothes. This is the only child of the eldest family, so he should have more clothes than the grandchildren of the second and third families.
Who made her like the eldest son more among her two sons? She loves the eldest son more among all her grandsons. What's more, this grandson was the one she had been looking forward to for a long time, so the feeling between them was even more special.
Miao Sanfeng happily distributed next month's allowance, carefully took out the freshly steamed egg custard from the stove, and sprinkled a handful of chopped green onions on it. A fragrant aroma hit her in the face, and Dani, who was squatting on the stove cooking porridge, couldn't help swallowing.
"Take this to your mother." Old Mrs. Miao ordered with a stern face. She still remembered that these silly girls wanted to go to school, and her face was longer than that of a donkey.
Jiang Dani obediently brought the tray and carefully placed the egg custard on it. She also brought a few sets of bowls and chopsticks, and the bowl of wild vegetable corn porridge, and carefully carried them back into the house.
Usually the sisters would not sit at the table for breakfast. The pickled vegetables prepared by Miao were only enough for the men in the family. They could not eat a single bite, so they simply ate breakfast in their own room every day.
When she entered the room, the people in the bed got up.
Jiang Dahai, with sleepy eyes, touched his messy hair. Seeing his son drinking milk in a daze, he smiled with a mouthful of white teeth. His hand, as big as a palm fan, couldn't help but touch his son's chubby butt.
"Wa wah wah--" Jiang Laidie was so scared that she stopped drinking milk and woke up instantly. Although he had become a boy in this life, his decades of life as a woman in his previous life made him explode all of a sudden.
"Look at you, the baby was drinking milk so hard, but you made him cry again." Gu Dongmei was so angry that she punched him on the chest several times, then hugged her son and coaxed him softly.
Jiang Dahai didn't know that he made his son cry by just touching him, and he was in a panic, not knowing what to do.
"Mom, let me coax my brother. Grandma made some steamed egg custard for you. Eat it while it's hot." Jiang Dani brought the tray to the table on the kang and took her brother from Gu Dongmei.
She still had to give face to her elder sister. Jiang Laidie adjusted herself to a comfortable position in her sister's arms and stopped crying.
"Dani is the one who has the solution." Jiang Dahai praised his daughter with a silly smile.
"You, try not to bother my son in the future." Gu Dongmei rolled her eyes at him, scooped half of the egg cake in the bowl into the corn porridge next to her, and stirred it carefully with a spoon. The porridge made from wild vegetable buns was already black and yellow, and it was not noticeable at all after adding some egg custard.
"Mom!" Dani was about to speak when Gu Dongmei pointed outside the curtain, and Dani stopped talking immediately.
Jiang Dahai didn't say anything. He put on his clothes, touched his daughters' heads, and walked out.
When Jiang Lai Di saw this scene, his eyes lit up. Why didn't he think of sneaking things in without anyone noticing? When everyone was asleep at night, he would try to use his mental power to control the items in the space and put them where he wanted.
"I'm awake now. How come I heard my grandson crying just now?" Old man Jiang sat on a chair, slurping the porridge in front of him and taking some side dishes with him.
"It's all my fault. I made the child cry. Dani just coaxed the child. The child likes Dani and her sisters. Mei Zi and I can't coax her."
Jiang Dahai sat down opposite his father, picked up the hot porridge in front of him and said.
"It is the responsibility of the sisters to coax their younger brother well." Old man Jiang's frown relaxed a little, and he also had some good feelings towards his granddaughters, whom he never paid attention to on weekdays.
"Dad, when are you planning to go visit the educated youth?" Jiang Dahai asked anxiously. His son didn't even have a name yet, so was it possible for him to give him a nickname first?
"What's the hurry?" Jiang Cheng drank the last mouthful of porridge without even looking up. "We should let the old man rest for a while. Those educated youth are not like us country folks. They don't get up so early. If we go now, we will be looked down upon."
After saying this, Old Man Jiang took out the pipe from his belt, thought for a moment and put it back. Forget it, he'll smoke it after he gets out of the house.
The four educated youth assigned to their village this time were not capable of working, otherwise the Hongqi community would not have assigned them to their village. One of them was a man and one was a woman from Haicheng, which was not comparable to their rural areas. After only a few days, the villagers heard a lot of complaints from the two. The remaining two, a little girl, came from the south and was not used to their food. She lay in bed as soon as she arrived. She has not recovered yet and cannot work at all.
The villagers complained a lot, wondering whether they were here to help or to be their ancestor.
The last young man from the capital had a better reputation in the village. He was a scholar with a good temper. Although he was a little weak and not very agile at work, he went to the fields with them obediently every day. He was a boy of fifteen or sixteen years old, and looked very gentle. On weekdays, he would call people uncle or aunt when they met them. If they saw that he could not finish his work, they would help him.
The young man that Old Man Jiang was looking for was that young man.
Old man Jiang did not go to work today. He put his hands behind his back and walked slowly towards the house where the educated youth lived. Along the way, he greeted the villagers who were going to work and congratulated them on having another grandson.
"Grandpa, Grandpa." Aiguo and Aidan, who were about to go to school, saw Old Man Fu at a glance and ran towards him.
"Grandpa, give me money quickly, I need to buy food." The two children pulled at Old Man Jiang's clothes. Old Man Jiang had a problem with one of his legs, and he couldn't withstand such a pull, and he staggered from side to side.
Jiang Aiguo is the eldest grandson, he is six years old this year, and Aidang is two years younger than him. Because they have never been hungry since childhood, the two children look better than other children in the village, they are fair and tender. Usually, old man Jiang dotes on them, but at this moment, the two children's unruly behavior still makes him frown.
Old man Jiang had fought against the Japanese in the battlefield in his early years. At least a dozen or twenty Japanese had died at his hands. When he frowned, the intimidating force frightened the two children so much that they became more restrained in their movements.
"Grandpa, give me money quickly, I want to buy some Guopi Dan." Jiang Aiguo was frightened, but relying on the love of old man Jiang in the past, he stretched out his hand and asked him for money.
Mom said that grandpa is very rich, so if you see it, ask him for it, otherwise it will be given to the newborn bastard in my uncle's family.
Old man Jiang frowned and touched his pockets. He didn't have a penny on him. In the past, he had something on his mind. He wanted to adopt one of his two grandsons to his eldest son, so he had always indulged these two grandsons. He wanted them to develop feelings with his eldest son's family. From time to time, he would give them five cents and a dime so that they could buy snacks at the supply and marketing cooperative in the county town.
In the past, when I only had these two grandsons in my heart and eyes, I didn’t realize when the originally well-behaved and obedient grandsons became the unruly ones they are now.
My grandson is still young, so I have to teach him quickly.
Old man Jiang said sternly: "It's school day now. If you don't go to school, why do you need money? When school is on vacation, grandpa will give you pocket money."
Nowadays, kids from the village don't have much pocket money. That's a fashionable thing only kids from the city have. Old man Jiang thinks he is more generous than all the older generations in the village.
Jiang Aiguo didn't think so. His mother was right. His grandfather's heart was biased towards the little bastard from his uncle's family. He angrily pulled his younger brother aside and ran away without saying goodbye.
"You old man, when you get old, don't expect me to see you off to the end of your life." After running a distance, he turned around and shouted to old man Jiang.
Such vicious words came out of the cute and pretty child's mouth. How could a child as young as him know the meaning of these words? He must have learned them from what the adults at home said.
Jiang Cheng was so angry that he was half dead. He was trembling and pointing at the backs of his two grandsons with one hand, without saying a word for a long time.
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