Grandparenting in ‘me too’ times

It was ‘metoo’ time during my most recent visit to the grandkids. 

Elliott, whose language progress is startling, has learned that immensely useful expression. By which I really mean ‘me too’. ‘Hashtag’, though it may of course come later, is still a little beyond him for now.

And ‘me too’ doesn’t even always mean quite what you might think. It may be because big sister Matilda has something, or is doing something, that he thinks he could profitably partake of too. Literally, then, ‘me too’. Sometimes, on the other hand, it really means ‘me instead’. 

Like when Matilda got the last yogurt. The message of his ‘me too’ was clearly “I can give that a much better home than she can”. Swiftly followed by “Send it over this way, pronto.”

Still, there are plenty of adults who don’t really distinguish between ‘me too’ and ‘me instead’, aren’t there? One was recently President of the United States, another Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Elliott strikes me as having a better character than either of them, and just needs to take his educational breakthrough with ‘me too’ a step or two further.

Talking about educational breakthroughs, I had my own during this last visit. 

Elliott has mastered the notion that peeing in a toilet bowl is a pretty damn clever thing to do. So, as we were getting ready to go to a birthday party – that was for a 49th birthday, not for someone in their peer group – he announced that he was going to show me how he’d mastered that process.

“Just push his nappy to one side,” Sheena, his mother, told me. “You can pull it up again afterwards.”

It was a fresh nappy – OK, OK, diaper if you prefer – which she’d just put on him. I pushed it down. He performed, admirably I should say. And I pulled it back up again.

Except, unfortunately, that the nappy had come undone and, when I closed it again, I got it wrong. An error for which I was the one to pay. At the party, Elliott, who gets on well with Dad-dad (why bother with a complicated word like ‘Granddad’ when everybody understands ‘Dad-dad’?), was sitting on my lap. A disconcerting sense of wetness began to spread up one of my legs. And, yes, when I looked, I discovered a tell-tale soaking on that side of my shorts.

“I thought putting a nappy on would be a pretty intuitive job,” my son Nicky told me later, after he’d put a new one on Elliott.

Well, I’m glad to say that it is intuitive, and when I undertook the task on two later occasions, it worked just fine. My only defence? Putting a nappy on from scratch is one thing, re-fixing one that’s been taken down is another.

That may not be much of an excuse, but I don’t have another, so that’s the only one you’re getting.

Interestingly, this wasn’t the only unconventional use to which my shorts were put. One of my grandparental duties was taking the kids to school each day. This was more enjoyable than in the past, because they both walk now and I didn’t have to push them in a pram or pull them in their favourite wagon (tough on the way to school, which is almost entirely uphill). As a rule, I made sure that I had tissues in a pocket in case either of my charges needed a nose blowing, but on this occasion I’d forgotten. And Matilda was now demanding a nose blow. As I searched my pockets in vain, she came up with a solution.

“It’s OK,” she said, “I’ll use this.”

And before I could stop her, or even react, she’d wiped her nose on my shorts. That left the nose beautifully clean. And, to be honest, so were my shorts as soon as I could get back home and wash them off a bit.

On the way to school

Taking the kids to school was a lot of fun. The first stop is Matilda’s, since she’s at the big school (she’s rising four, after all). Outside there are some nice rocks Elliott can clamber over to his heart’s content, since walking along the pavement is just kind of safe, kind of dull. 

That’s the Elliott way, incidentally. There’s little pleasure in anything if there isn’t just an edge of danger to add spice to it. I discovered that when I took them to a local playground. They were both fine on swings and safe things like that. But they didn’t want to stick with those unchallenging experiences when they had the opportunity to run a few risks instead. 

Fun but not really the challenge we were looking for, is it?

There’s a skate park next to the playground. There were no skaters around so I was happy to let them play there. Elliott led the way, sliding down curved surfaces designed for skateboarders to make daredevil turns. There was a perfectly safe way to get back to the top, and a rather riskier one that involved climbing up a stepped partition wall, with a good chance of falling off either side.

No need to tell you which Elliott chose.

The safe way? You’ve got to be kidding. Much too tedious

Still, I have to say that he’s generally good with not pushing himself too far beyond what he can manage. Matilda’s got good at moving, at some speed, across a rope bridge in the playground. With his ‘me too’ outlook, Elliott made it clear he wanted to do the same. But I was impressed that he surveyed the challenge, then stopped and waited for me to come and help him across.

Angels rush in where the daredevil wisely fears to tread

Sensible fellow.

Then there was the moment when Matilda showed us what it means to be a big girl of nearly four. The sad part is that being a big girl means being exposed to peer pressure. “Big girls don’t…” has become a bit of a phrase for her, and it’s a pity when what completes the sentence is something she obviously likes.

For instance, she has for years had a sock puppet which is vaguely like an elephant, if you can think of elephants as very small and with no legs. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, she has always called it ‘Adge’. Because she likes it so much, there are several of them in the house, so one or two can be washed – like my shorts after a nappy fiasco – while others remain available for use. She knows very well that there are several, but always treats the one she happens to be with at any time as though it were the single individual she’s always known and always called ‘Adge’. 

Adge
One of them. Though in some special sense,
they’re all the same one

Incidentally, she knows that ‘Adge’ means ‘elephant’. We discovered that when, on a visit to Valencia, we took her to the zoo and she saw some real elephants. She immediately pointed at them crying ‘Adge! Adge!’

Anyway, the other day she announced that ‘big girls don’t have Adge’.

Peer pressure. Inescapable. Painful.

Still, she had the sense to stick with Adge and enjoy the company still for a while, at least while at home. But I couldn’t help sensing she wasn’t entirely comfortable about it. Still three but already learning that not all forms of behaviour will be acceptable to her peer group.

Ah, well.

Incidentally, she’s also pretty good at ‘me instead’ behaviour. One of the things she likes about Dad-dad visits is that she gets multiple opportunities to steal my glasses. Her instead of me, you see. And very fetching she looks too.

They may be my glasses. 
but they suit her far better

If the kids have decided that the name ‘Granddad’ is one to modify, to ‘Dad-dad’, they feel much the same about their Uncle Michael. Oddly, they’ve adopted the same name for him as my other granddaughter did at their age, though now she’s a young woman about to start college. 

All three of them decided from early on to dispense with the word ‘Uncle’. Instead they call him ‘Michael Michael’ (well, I don’t think Aya still does, you understand, but the other two do). And Michael Michael is someone whose visits are always particularly exciting. 

Michael Michael
His visits never disappoint

He is, indeed, always greeted with great joy.

Finally, I can’t close this without a reference to food. I cooked only once and, as usual, I made pasta with a tomato sauce. Those two little sophisticates have developed a major liking for pesto, so they’re always disappointed with what I prepare. That made it particularly gratifying to have it confirmed that, despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, Elliott really got a lot out of eating a plate of my pasta. As he demonstrated when ‘Michael Michael’ picked him up after the meal.

OK, OK, the pasta wasn’t too bad after all

That particularly sophisticated diner, Matilda, has developed a liking for a new kind of fruit. Most of us call them ‘red currants’. That, I’ve now learned from Matilda is entirely wrong. They’re called ‘sour things’. And she can’t get enough of them.

Sour things
Much appreciated new delicacy

So I whenever I could, I would feed her some.

And, in smaller quantities – I don’t think he likes them that much – to Elliott too. Because, naturally, once he saw Matilda eating them, he had to burst out with his favourite new saying.

“Me too! Me too!” he called out.