Grandparenting: bikes and meals and stories

One of the benefits of grandparenting is that it gives you the chance to learn some of things you never mastered as a parent.

I’m at the grandkids’ home as I write this. And, as always, there’ve been plenty of learning experiences for me. 

For instance, there’s the extent to which kids like rituals. Elliott and I established a new one in my first three days here. Every evening when it comes to time for bed, he grabs one of my fingers, and leads me towards the stairs. Then I jump him up the stairs, two at a time, with him making a little grunt of pleasure at each jump.

It's not as though he expects me to do anything once we get up there. He’s living proof that often it isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey. And, boy, he enjoys that journey.

Having said all that, he didn’t want any of it last night. A healthy attitude towards ritual, I feel. Do it when it feels right, but don’t let it dominate you.

He also seems to appreciate my cooking. As, I’m glad to say, does his big sister, Matilda. That may not be unrelated to the fact that I tend to cook simple things that are easy to prepare, and likely to appeal to a child’s taste. Like spaghetti. 

Elliott and Matilda enjoying Granddad's fine cuisine

What’s best about a child enjoying a meal is that their behaviour leaves you in no doubt of their appreciation. And I have the photos to prove it. 

They both continue to make stunning progress with their bikes, now their biggest source of outdoor amusement. It’s a joy watching them getting so much pleasure from them. As long as you’re not alone, that is. I soon discovered that being the only adult with the two of them on bikes is a recipe for a heart attack. 

There’s always one that rides off in front, while the other decides that it’s really, really important to take a look at something a long way behind. That’s usually a shop where chocolate might be bought, if it’s Matilda. With Elliott, it can be something far simpler but a lot odder. He likes to find a place with two or three steps in front of it. Picture the entrance to a house, say. No one, he seems to believe, knows what true happiness is until they’ve pushed their bike up three steps. 

“It’s a huge effort,” he seems to be saying, “but, boy, it’s worth it to get to the top.”

Of course, that only means that he has to get back down again. It seems, however, that this is fun too. Now I can understand it if there is, say, a short ramp next to the steps, down which he can slide. And, indeed, he will always take the ramp if there is one. But it doesn’t matter if there isn’t. Struggling back down, supporting the weight of the bike, is almost as satisfying as struggling up.

It seems a weird pastime but, hey, mountaineering’s no different really, is it? Just the same thing on another scale.

He makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that you shouldn’t do to others what you would have them do unto you. Their tastes may be different. In this instance, at least, Elliott’s tastes and mine differ significantly.

That’s not always the case. Elliott has become a keen fan of the Cars films. And I freely confess that I get a sight more pleasure watching them for the n-th time (where n is a large number) than I do from practically any other show or film I’ve been obliged to rewatch that often as part of my grandfatherly existence.

But back to the bikes. Having one grandkid on a chocolate hunt or a three-step climb, while the other bikes off into the distance, is a real problem, especially since the ‘distance’ inevitably involves reaching a street at some stage. With cars. That one has to be stopped at the kerb, while the one hanging around at the back, has to be spurred into movement. That requires me to be in two places at the same time, a trick I still haven’t mastered. 

Matilda and Elliott setting a metaphor for life
Going round and round at speed and getting nowhere
Uncle Michael filming the whole for posterity

The moral is to maintain a one-to-one adult to kid ratio if the kids are on bikes.

Talking about tricks I have or haven’t mastered brings me back to what I said at the beginning, about learning as a grandparent what I never learned as a parent.

My Dad was excellent at inventing stories for my brother and me. They were long, rambling and wholly engrossing. The protagonists were always the three of us. We were forever getting into scrapes, generally by launching ourselves into massively ingenious criminal endeavours, which always ended up being less ingenious than they seemed at first, leaving the three of us in jail. From which we would, of course, escape. There was never an ending, which meant we could go right on next time from where we’d got to the time before.

The stories were terribly unfair to my brother. It was always him who got into the most laughable scrapes that left him complaining, “why is it always me?” while the two of us chuckled at his discomfiture. It always amazed me that my father would do that, because there was no question of his preferring me to my brother, and certainly my brother always remained hugely attached to him.

Anyway, I never managed to invent stories to amuse my boys the way he amused us. I just read them books. However, since one of those books was The Lord of the Rings, I can assure you this wasn’t an easy option.

With Matilda, I decided it was time to start making up stories. When she asked for a bedtime book the other day, and had trouble choosing one, I started telling her a great story – I thought – about how she had gone back a long, long way in time, to visit the dinosaurs. She had carefully avoided falling into the claws of a Tyrannosaurus, and instead had established a friendship with a Diplodocus (if the two species don’t belong to the same era, please don’t bother to point it out. After all, that’s hardly the least plausible part of this story).

Matilda (in my account) ended up taking a trip around the prehistoric world on the back of her friendly Diplodocus and even saw a Tyrannosaurus from a distance, in perfect safety, since the Diplodocus was far too big for the predator to attack it.

You can see that this was a different style of story from my Dad’s. It even had an ending, when Matilda heard her father calling her home to go to bed, said goodbye to the Diplodocus and headed back. Different from his kind of stories but, I fondly believed, a success all the same, judging by the way she immediately came to sit next to me when I started, and sat with her eyes as wide as she could get them while it lasted.

Alas. I had been fooled by appearances. As soon as her Dad told her it was time for bed, she complained.

“I want a book!”

“You’ve had a story,” he replied.

“I don’t want a story!” she objected, “I want a book!”

I had to get out of the room while he read her a book (a shorter one than Lord of the Rings).

Oh, well. You learn more from your failures than from your successes, and I suppose that’s as true in storytelling as in any endeavour. And at least my apprenticeship has got under way at last.

Though, judging by Matilda’s reaction, I’m still far from reaching a point that would have made my Dad proud. 

Postscript 

Matilda and Elliott’s Dad, Nicky, tells me I’m talking nonsense.

“Of course you invented stories for us,” he assures me. “Stories in which we were characters, where you tried to put us in situations that were embarrassing for us.”

Oh, well. I have no memory of that. And I reckon my story, here, is better for forgetting it.