I Love Being a Grandfather

You know, I’ve gotten to the point where I actually like Tuesdays. It’s a special day of the week for me because on Tuesdays, my granddaughters come to visit me. I look forward all day to their visits, and I’m never disappointed. Grandkids bring their own joy with them when they come to visit.

I think my favorite part of their visit is just spending time with them and watching them be themselves. My granddaughters are 7 and 3 ½, and their imaginations are as fertile as they can be. I’m happy to say that my daughter encourages them to be creative, and they don’t spend a lot of time on electronic devices. My daughter prefers that they do activities that require them to use their imaginations and interact with other people. That mindset has made them both pretty interesting conversationalists even at their young ages.

The truth that comes out of a little kid’s mouth can be downright astounding and, while I love watching them play, I love the conversations we have while they are at play. I’ll give you an example.

Yesterday, when the girls were at my house, we played with Play-Doh. Now, there’s a low-tech item that allows kids to use their full powers of imagination. My youngest granddaughter, Shiloh, was making all sorts of shapes with her Play-Doh. She wasn’t going for anything specific; she was just making odd shapes. She would then hold up her artwork and ask me what I saw in it. For my part, I would tell her what I saw in the shape and, from time to time, she would offer up what she saw in the shape. Simple, but fun.

After a while, she gave me the clay and told me to make something and she would guess what it was. I took the clay and, just as Shiloh had done, I squeezed and molded the clay into a random shape. Shiloh has a great imagination, and she would see things like frogs, lizards and rabbits in the shape and it was all good fun, but somewhere along the line, I asked her what she saw and she said, “A monster.” Well, she guessed “monster” about three times in a row, and I thought maybe she was going through a phase of being afraid of monsters, so I told her, “You do know that there’s no such thing as monsters in real life, don’t you? They only exist in movies and cartoons. She looked at me and said, “And in Play-Doh.”

A little bit later in the afternoon, my daughter and my oldest granddaughter, Layla, were joking around with each other. Basically giving each other a hard time about nothing specific, I was reminded of my relationship with my own mother. My mom and I got along great, and our exchanges were always silly and somewhat sarcastic.

At any rate, my daughter, Annie, was giving Layla a hard time about something and finally, in exasperation, gave up and said, “Well, what if I just give you a beating?” Layla, knowing that that wasn’t going to happen, stood there and said, “Go ahead. Beat me all you want.” Then she thought about what she had said and added, “You should never tell your mother she can beat you all she wants; especially if she’s crazy.” With that, she walked out of the room and off to play with Play-Doh.