Overriding a Relationships Propertry

I have a child relationship that is denormalized. I want to normalize
it at the object level once it’s retrieved:

class Parent
has_many :denormalized_children, :class_name=>‘Child’

def children
if @normalized_children.nil?
@normalized_children = []
denormalized_children.group_by(&:number).each { |c|
@normalized_children << NormalizedChild.new©
}
end
@normalized_children
end
end

This works fine, but I don’t want to eager load them
as :denormalized_children. I’d like to use :children. So I tried:

class Parent
has_many :children

alias :denormalized_children :children
def children
#Same definition
end
end

AR doesn’t like this as it expects the children prop to return
something that responds to loaded.

has_many :children, :group=>‘number’

doesnt work either since it discards all but N unique numbers. So if
I have 10 with number 1 and 5 with number 2 I’ll only get back 2
children.

Is there any way to do this without having to change the name of the
relationship?

I can’t use after_load (or whatever it’s called) in the Child class
since the children need to be grouped by their relationship to their
parent.

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks