Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of grandparenting

It’s not the first time we’ve been accompanied on a grandparenting visit by Luci and Toffe, the poodles who kindly allow us to share their home with them, in return for regular deliveries of food. 

Grandparenting visits take us to Hoyo de Manzanares, in the hills north of Madrid, to see, and help care for, two grandkids, and their overworked parents. We took Luci and Toffee on the current visit. And this is the first time that Matilda, who has now reached the advanced age of two years and two months, has felt fairly comfortable with them. 

They have, indeed, become a new source of fun for her. Well, I say ‘they’, but it’s really Toffee that has absorbed her attention. Luci’s a little older and a great deal more cautious. She’s clearly spent enough time with Matilda and her brother Elliott, who has now attained the ripe old age of six months, not to feel that they’re in any sense strangers. But she still prefers to hang back a bit, and not get too close to those strange creatures, human puppies, with their unpredictable behaviour.

Toffee knows no such reticence. “Human puppies?” she says, “Give me more of them. You can never have too many. Especially if they’re ready to play.”

Granddad enjoying a little quality time with Elliott
Toffee sees no reason why she shouldn't be involved

Well, Elliott maybe needs a little while to really get into those games. It might be helpful if, say, he knew how to walk. Matilda, on the other hand, is nearly ready for them. She’s just a trifle nervous still. After all, Toffee does rather like to think of herself as an assault poodle, despite being smaller than our cat, and maybe that colossal size, at the level of her heart and soul, despite her diminutive physical size, communicates itself to Matilda.

Even so, there was a breakthrough on this visit. On the very day of our arrival, Matilda was introduced to the sheer joy of walking Toffee on her lead. Even when she got tired – and Toffee too, since on walks her small size sometimes overwhelms her huge heart – we put Matilda in her buggy with Toffee on her lap. Joy! Matilda didn’t so much gurgle her delight as express it in sudden bursts of laughter. She laughed out loud, in fact. Or lolled, as I suppose we should say these days.

Toffee joy for Matilda

Elliott was less excited by events 
at the other end of his (shared) buggy

Both children now attend the local infant school. “At six months?” I hear you cry. Yep, the Spanish like to start them young. Matilda’s already in her second year, the last at the present school. Next year, when she’ll be a big girl of three, it’ll be time to move on to the next stage of her education, the infant/primary school. 

Her present school goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure the children have a learning experience that includes a high proportion of fun. At one point, as I’ve described before, they issued all the kids with flour and everyone got covered with the stuff, starting with the teacher. Another time, they’d brought in a huge collection of leaves for the children to play, presumably with the aim that they learn what autumn’s all about (or otoño: one of the great benefits of this kind of school to immigrant families like our own is that the kids are immersed in the language from a very young age).

After the school Halloween party
Matilda and Elliott with Mamama
(as well call grandma) and Daddy

Today, the last weekday before Halloween, the whole school was given over to the kids having fun as skeletons, ghouls, zombies or anything else monstruous enough to be associated with the eve of that great Christian festively, All Souls’ Day. It always amuses me that Halloween, this import from the US with its far more widespread attachment to Christianity than Europe generally shows, has converted a solemn festival dedicated to our dead and departed into a major children’s day of witches, undead and various ghosts, straight out of the pages of a comic strip.

Is the Bible really still as important to the American soul as Marvel comics?

The result of this active and celebratory day is that the children came back pretty exhausted. Matilda was off for a swimming lesson later, but in the meantime she needed to rest a little, to get her breath back. And what better way to do that than to have granddad read her a story (in Spanish, no less)? And how could it possibly be better than if, as well as granddad sitting on the chair to read Matilda her story, they were also accompanied by Toffee and Luci?

A quiet moment for Matilda
with Granddad, Toffee and Luci

I’m glad we brought the dogs with us this time. Their presence feels like a perfect ingredient to ensure the trip’s. A real enhancement to the grandparenting mission.