Grandparenting

Someone
once told me that the reason God doesn’t give little babies
to older folks is that we’d lay them down and forget where
we left them.



I’m about to find out if this is true or not. Our oldest son
and his wife are about to become parents for the first time.
By the time this is printed I feel certain the little bundle
from heaven will have arrived. The next thing to do after
this momentous occasion is to figure out what we must do
next.



It isn’t that we’re strangers to being grandparents, we have
a twelve year old and a God child of two; it’s just that all
of this seems to have changed over the years since we had
babies in our house. Not that it’s something to be afraid
of, well, hold on, perhaps it is.



Our son and daughter in law spent last weekend practicing
loading and unloading the car seat. We never had to do this;
we just loaded them up and held them in our arms as we
traveled on down the highway. When they got too big for
that, we strapped them in with seatbelts and let it go at
that. Now there are all kinds of rules about who can ride
where and how. Apparently no one can ride in the front seat
of my car until they are over twenty years of age. I’m not
sure if this is a federal mandate or just something the
family has decided. I can’t find any sticker on my dash that
tells me anything, but then again what do I know?



How do the parents of today get by driving anything smaller
than a truck? You’ve got car seats, strollers, day beds,
diaper bags, used diaper container, food containers, extra
clothes, camera bags, a television and DVD player to load
up, and that’s only if you’re going to the grocery store.
Think what they’ll need if they come to visit us for a day
or so.



When microwaves first came out we thought we’d died and gone
to heaven. You could just stick that baby bottle in the
thing and wait fifteen or twenty seconds (don’t hold me to
this, I’ve forgotten exactly how long it took) and then
yanked the bottle out and there you were, happy camper,
happy baby. No more sticking the bottle into that little
ceramic pot that took forever to heat up. Now they don’t
even use glass bottles that look like bottles. They have
bottles that are tilted or have little hand holes in them so
snookums can hold their own. Our kids were tough, we made
them hold their own without any hand holes until they
started first grade. I think it was first grade, I might be
wrong.



The mothers of today have little radio transmitters to alert
them in their bedrooms when the baby starts crying or gets
fussy. My wife could hear our kids through steel. I bet I
could have our kids locked up inside of a Wells Fargo vault
and her sleeping 100 yards away and she’d hear one of them
if they burped funny.



But all kidding aside, it’s a great time to be alive and
going into this stage of our lives. It brings new adventure.
New vistas. New horizons. New financial requirements.



It also takes me to new and exciting places I’ve never been
before, like Toys R Huge or something like this. I had my
first dose of this adventure the other night, when we went
to buy a birthday present for our two year old God child. I
don’t know what I was expecting, but chaos wasn’t the word.
Do you think all of those kids in those stores are on some
sort of sugar high? I tried yelling that there was a giant
kid eating alien monster waiting for them at the front door
if they didn’t wind down and get calm. It didn’t faze a one
of them. In fact I think it just incensed the crowd as a
whole. I got the feeling that if I were to tell any of the
three hundred or so two foot tall wild humans that the store
was closing and they had to leave, they would have turned on
me in a heartbeat and torn me from limb to limb. I think I
know how missionaries felt when they were faced with pygmy
cannibals.



I’ve faced a lot of danger in my life, but to tell the
truth, this just scared the you know what out of me. I was
in total shock and amazement to see mothers calmly walking
around joking and talking as if nothing was wrong while I am
trying to alert them to the fact that several of the smaller
humanoids are attempting to pull over several of the
shelving displays. This could spell danger for us all. My
wife is totally oblivious to this potential disaster and is
pushing her cart as if everything is perfectly normal. They
must use some sort of calming gas in the air-conditioning
system, either that or I am too hyper for it to have any
real effect.



In my haste to escape I hurriedly agree to buy more than I
had planned, but I think the added expense probably was
worth it in terms of the possible dangers that I was facing.



I’ll keep you posted on further events as they happen.