Great Grandparenting
My new baby granddaughter came to visit over Memorial Day weekend (oh and yes, her parents came too). Maya Rose is now four and a half months old.
That means she is able to:
- sit up with a great deal of propping and assistance (thanks to those foam Bumbo chairs)
- hold her head up albeit in a bobblehead fashion
- respond with such a wide mouthed smile your heart performs summersaults like a cartoon acrobat
- gurgle laugh when her neck is tickled or even when the dog barks
- flips over from tummy time
- talks to you in her husky cooing voice
That is a major change since visiting her the first month of her life when her only job was preventing her parents from sleeping. In my earlier visit to snowy Chicago, I tried to convince her she had won the parent lottery. Both parents have Ph.D.s in psychology and are incredibly loving, empathic people. This information, however, failed to dissuade her from getting up three times each night or eating like a person twice her size.Being around her is like eating an ice cream sundae every day with no need to worry about the calories. Each morning the bedroom door would open and there were the two of them- he (her father) in boxers, her in her diaper, a mass of exposed flesh and dangling limbs. "Here, I'm going back to bed" he would say plopping her and a pack of diapers into my arms. Time was suspended in the ensuing two hours as we engaged in "motherese" (a/k/a baby talk), hugs, and baby games. (That is until she`would go from this ? to ? in 60 seconds when she was hungry)
I'm probably not the first to discover grand-parenting is pretty awesome. Cresting toward this experience people said things like, "there's a reason they call it "grand", or "the reason grandchildren and grandparents get along so well is they have a common enemy." Gore Vidal even suggested, "never have children, just grandchildren." I really don't feel this way. Pre-grandchildren I thought I might. But I'm pretty crazy about my own kids. Aside from the umbilical cord we shared all those years ago, we have 30+ years invested in these relationships. My former mother-in-law reassured my young daughter years ago that her heart had the capacity to expand with the arrival of each new grandchildren (she was referring to the impending birth of my second born son). I'm feeling that way today. I’m now the proud grandmother of two grandchildren. I love my own children no less, my heart has just grown in size to accommodate new family members.