grandparenting

Yesterday Was a Good Day

Yesterday was a good day. Not the day off I pictured when I took this job (it isn’t an actual day off, but we pretend), but a good day.

When I signed on as the primary caretaker for my granddaughter, the wins were simple. Bottle finished. Burp achieved. Dry diaper confirmed. The job description fit on an index card.

It doesn’t anymore.

Now, a good day means I kept her entertained long enough that she went down for her nap without excessive drama. It means everything ran on something resembling a schedule, because the adults in her life are trying very hard to pretend their lives aren’t a complete shipwreck since she arrived. It means I successfully assessed which objects on her high chair tray were unlikely to choke her, a calculation made more interesting by the fact that God has not yet seen fit to give her teeth.

The surveillance portion of the day is non-negotiable. We walk laps — kitchen, living room, hallway, back to kitchen — while she conducts a thorough inspection of everything that has changed since her last walk. Usually, nothing has changed. She checks anyway.

Outside, it’s the mulch. The brown mulch in the flower beds has captivated her in a way I cannot fully explain. It fits perfectly in her little fists. Also in her mouth, which is where most things end up. Her appetite operates on one schedule: eyes open.

A good day also means I timed the diaper change correctly. Change her, set her down in the living room, execute the strategic maneuver of leaving the bathroom door open, and move with purpose. If the math works out, I’m washing my hands when her little crawling body appears around the door frame, just making sure I’m not having an adventure without her.

Then there are the moments that have nothing to do with logistics.

The reluctant laugh — the one where her tummy figures out she’s ticklish before she’s fully committed to the idea. The way she sticks her chest out when you hold her hands, and she leads you, with great authority, to all the important places that require daily review. The diaper bag left unzipped for thirty seconds, which is thirty seconds too long, and the full excavation that follows. She’s looking for something. We don’t know what. It goes in her mouth.

She has also discovered my glasses. There is a game now — I didn’t name it, she invented it — where she removes them from my face with the focused determination of someone defusing a bomb. I’m usually holding her because she’s in a pre-nap mood, which means I’m also the only available entertainment. The lenses are a mess. It’s fine.

There’s also the nap itself, which raises its own question: when she wakes up crying after forty minutes, is she actually awake, or just passing through? The answer determines whether I have time to start dinner. I have not yet developed a reliable system.

The job description has changed, but so have the fringe benefits. She has a personality that walks into a room before she does. The diapers are worse, the opinions are louder, and she has a will that I respect even when it is aimed directly at me.

But I get to watch a little human discover herself. Every lap around the kitchen, every fistful of mulch, every reluctant laugh — she’s figuring out what the world is.

She’s not the only one.

The “Pepper Incident” and Other Liquid Legacies

When I was growing up, my family was not known to waste much of anything. My kids realized long ago that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree on that one. We ate our “warmups” (leftovers), and one of the biggest tragedies of my youth was the infamous “Pepper Incident.” My mom had chopped up a batch of peppers and froze them alongside every loaf of bread and pack of buns in the freezer. Whether freezer bags just didn’t seal as well back then or it was a secret plot to get me to eat less carbs, the result was a catastrophe. For months, every hamburger or hot dog bun I touched had a distinct, inescapable “pepper vibe.” It ruined the protein and ensured I wouldn’t become a fan of peppers for decades. In fact, it got so bad I started opting for plain bread—which, in those days, my father bought in “old” bags at a substantial discount. If we didn’t freeze it immediately, that bread was destined to host its own thriving mold colony.

The Mystery at the Dinner Table

But I digress. My mother’s efficiency didn’t stop at peppers. She’d often drain the juice from canned fruits because the recipe didn’t require it. What do you do with a cup of random fruit juice sitting in the fridge? You pour it into the Kool-Aid container with whatever flavor was already there.

Dinner became a game of Russian Roulette for the taste buds. I wasn’t one to hold back. After the first sip, I’d ask, “What exactly did you mix up for us tonight?” My mother didn’t mean any harm; she was just being efficient. But those flavor potpourris made an impression—one that would eventually haunt my own children.

Upping the Ante: The Bus Stop Games

When my sons were in elementary school, they took a shuttle bus to a pickup location near our home. To show them I was thinking about them, I’d bring a snack and a drink. The snack was the easy part. The drink was where I “kicked it up a notch.”

The game was simple: “Guess What You Are Drinking?” At my disposal, I had various fruit juices, every Kool-Aid packet known to man, and a set of food coloring bottles. I’d create concoctions that looked like pond water (minus the floaties) but were guaranteed to be drinkable. This was before the pickle juice craze, so I kept it somewhat civil.

The heart of the game was “taste-budding out” the flavors dancing over their palates. I’d offer partial credit—when you’re mixing two types of Kool-Aid, a splash of pear juice, and blue food dye, you can’t exactly expect perfection. They participated because they knew I wasn’t required to bring a snack, and perhaps because of the unspoken rule: If you don’t drink today’s mystery, there might not be one tomorrow. (I never did mention that part to their mother.)

The “Fun Grandpa” Era

I’d like to say I made everything fun for them growing up, but I didn’t. Like anyone, I had my cranky days. But as I spend time with my granddaughter now—occasionally offering a capful of Gatorade as a “chaser” after her bottle of formula—I hope I lean heavier into the fun side of the ledger.

If you can’t be a perfect parent, make sure you mix in enough quirky and fun to help the natives forget the days you didn’t quite “nail it.”

The Grey-Parenting Manifesto: All the Joy, None of the 2 A.M.s

Ellie has been with us for nine months now, and as her 30-hour-a-week “intern,” I’ve become an expert in her particular brand of chaos. We’ve moved past the “laying on a mat” phase—which lasted roughly eleven minutes—and bypassed tummy time entirely. Now, we are firmly in the Beeline Phase.

If I’m holding an apple, she’s coming for it. She’ll spot it from across the room and begin a determined crawl—the kind that says, I have a destination and you are in my way. Somewhere in the approach is a binky-muffled petition for a bite.

Since she has no teeth, “eating” is a generous term. She presses her lips against a peeled slice and creates an impressive vacuum seal to extract the juice. Her expression the entire time says, Of course you want to share this with me.

The House Patrol

When she isn’t hunting fruit, she’s on patrol. Ellie is curious to a fault—the kind of curiosity that assumes every drawer, cabinet, and doorstop is hiding a state secret. She wants to hold my fingers as we walk through the house to visit her favorite “stations.”

If there is a doorstop in my den, it must be strummed like a fine Stradivarius. It’s the same expression she gives the piano: I want on that bench, and I have opinions. When she reaches the one door that’s always closed, she studies it carefully. She concludes I am definitely hiding something and files a formal complaint with her eyes.

The fact that she drags me along for all of it, I’ve decided, is the whole point.

The Great Parenting Amnesia

Watching her hit these milestones has triggered a specific type of grandparent guilt: I have absolutely no memory of my own four children doing any of this.

If you asked me when my kids started crawling, I’d tell you, “Uh… before they started driving?” I have no recollection of their first words or their eating habits. Did they burp? Probably. They’re alive now, so I assume they were fed.

Whenever my adult children catch me staring at Ellie in wonder and ask, “Dad, don’t you remember me doing that?” I look them dead in the eye and say, “Of course I do. I was just testing you.”

In reality, I’m blank. I have the converted MiniDV files sitting on a Google Drive to prove I held the camera, but it feels like someone else handled the first ten years of their lives while I was busy worrying about the mortgage.

The High Chair Tactical Maneuver

Feeding Ellie is not a meal; it’s a structural engineering problem. Her mother is far more tolerant of “free-eating” than I am. My strategy is a pincer movement: sneak spoonfuls of yogurt in while she self-navigates an animal cracker (or “koo-kwee”).

It rarely goes to plan.

If she decides the yogurt isn’t for her, she ejects it. If I try to catch the spill, she blocks it with an incoming cracker. The result is a yogurt-based adhesive that bonds dissolving crumbs to her face, the tray, and my sleeve. Cleanup is a battle. The second I remove the tray, she conducts a frantic audit of her bib’s crumb pocket to see what survived. Between her constant movement and a deep-seated hatred of the washcloth, cleaning her is a four-man job currently handled by one sweaty grandpa.

Why I’m All In

We moved to Oklahoma knowing grandparenting was on the horizon. With our daughter and son-in-law navigating career and education changes, the math solved itself: a volunteer grandpa is cheaper, closer, and—if I may say so—better.

“Grey-parenting” isn’t the same as parenting, and that’s the beauty of it. We handle the bottles, the bibs, the “good poopies,” and the doorstop concerts. But the 2 a.m. wake-up calls? Those go back to the professionals.

If thirty-ish hours a week is the price of getting a second pass at the magic I was too distracted to notice the first time around, that’s not a sacrifice. It’s a pretty good deal—even if it means surrendering the occasional apple.