Rails - Apr 2009 - 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(c)
       }
    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