GRAND
PARENTING FOR DUMMIES
by
Mariane Holbrook
I
just checked Amazon.com and there are 2,017
self-help books for dummies ranging from
Sailing for Dummies to Investing in 401Ks for
Dummies to Pregnancy for Dummies (Is there
really a market for this one; isn't it just a
case of connecting the dots?)
But
there is no "Grand parenting for
Dummies." I submit that there should be.
I
love my grandkids like nobody else on earth. I
would happily strap myself to a railroad tie
for any one of them and cheer as the train
came speeding down the tracks to my certain
demise.
But
there are a few things I wonder about.
How
come my 2-year-old grandson can eat two tiny
bites of bland oatmeal for breakfast, get
suddenly sick and throw up the equivalent of 4
Meatball Hoagies, two 12-inch pepperoni
pizzas, an entire German chocolate cake and
two liters of coke?
I
love new mothers, those innocent, dead-tired
beings with sunken, glazed eyes who bravely
look at motherhood as the ultimate
multi-tasking challenge. Everything their
precocious child does is not only phenomenal
but worthy of preservation for their very
lucky posterity.
When
we were kids and spilled something on
grandma's carpet, our embarrassed mamas
grabbed a bucket and mopped up not only that
two-inch spot of chocolate but our moms
cleaned grandma's entire carpet, washed the
windows and curtains, reupholstered the couch
and installed central air conditioning just to
make atonement.
Today's
mommies gaze wistfully at their toddler's
green magic marker stains on grandma's white
living room carpet, painstakingly remove an
eight-inch square of the stained carpet with a
sharp razor blade and clutch it to their
breasts with a sigh of wonder and amazement.
Then they lovingly have it matted and framed
as a Christmas present for guess who? Grandma!
(That same darling two-year-old
toddler/grandson trotted past me recently,
turned around, wiped his runny nose on my
skirt and kept going. I admit to being
touched.}
When
we were kids, we put a baby tooth in a glass
of water only to find the tooth replaced with
a nickel the next morning. I never figured out
why the water was necessary. Did the Tooth
Fairy clean it before presenting it to Big
Chief Cavity or something? When my
granddaughter lost her tooth here during a
recent visit, her kind daddy slipped a
ten-spot under her pillow. I sat beside her
the rest of the night trying to extract every
remaining tooth in my head. At ten dollars a
pop, I could pay for that carpet.
Preparing
meals for grandkids is the ultimate trip,
provided you enjoy train wrecks. Three
granddaughters require three different kinds
of macaroni and cheese. Different foods must
NOT touch each other on the plate. The thought
of food mixed together in a casserole dish is
utterly unthinkable, the operative words being
"Eeeeew! Gross! What's that??"
Our
beautiful, paper-thin, teenage granddaughter,
Dena, works as a volunteer on Saturdays at the
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences as a
Junior Curator. Their recent "BugFest"
program attracted a couple of thousand
visitors.
One
of the more popular exhibits was "Café
Insectia", where strange critters were
cooked up right before your eyes and served to
adventurous epicureans: Ant-chiladas, Banana
Worm Nut Bread, Superworm Spice Cake or Hushed
Grubbies.
Dena
brought home a styrofoam cupful of large
stir-fried SCORPIONS (I kid you not) which she
ceremoniously removed from the cup one at a
time, holding it high with two fingers, then
dropping it into her open mouth. Dena slowly
savored each bite, smiling with satisfactory,
culinary delight to the jaw-dropping
astonishment and abject horror of her younger
siblings.
Not
bad for the absolute, ultimate picky eater who
shivers and totally shuns foods like eggs,
cheese, sandwiches and regular people foods.
Gotta love her.
A
recent trip with my grandkids to Wings Tourist
Trap Beach Store netted only one thing that
would last forever; my dislocated hip. After 2
1/2 hours of discussion and bartering with
grandma, the girls emerged with an inch long
bag of colored stones, 4 small blue seabirds
of undetermined species, a bottle of blue
water and sand with "Taiwan" stamped
on the bottom, and a dried baby alligator jaw.
Not bad for forty bucks.
I
adore my grandkids. I let them jump on my bed,
play in my jewelry box, drip popsicles on my
couch and leave the milk on the kitchen
counter all night.
Then
I send them home to their mom with spaghetti
sauce dripping from their hair.
Hey,
it's the least I can do.
