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Grandparenting
by Peary Perry
"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." |
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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.
© Peary Perry
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com
Letters
From North America - April
8 , 2005 column |
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