The grandparenting chronicles: carnival

Granddad’s glasses! What a joy for Elliott

February saw me back in Hoyo de Manzanares, visiting the grandkids in their home. It was carnival time, which meant cheerful celebrations by the kids in their respective schools. It also meant pressure on Sheena, their mother, to produce outstanding costumes she could feel proud of when she sent the kids to school wearing them.

Pollo Pepe arrives at Elliott’s school

As it happens, in the event, only one child celebrated carnical at school that week. That was Elliott, who went as Pollo Pepe, perhaps better known to English-speaking readers (and children) as Charlie the Chicken, aka Charlie Chick, the creation of one Nick Denchfield. Pollo Pepe is his Hispanic version and he’s gone down big in this country, as was forcefully illustrated by the sheer number of kids in chicken costumes. To be fair, one of the best was the one put together by Sheena. And, in any case, you can’t have too many Pollo Pepes, now can you?

And what about Matilda, I hear you cry? Well, she was disappointed, naturally, at being left out of the festivities on the day when we shepherded them to their respective schools, her in her day-to-day school clothes, him proudly dressed as Pepe. But, fear not: her disappointment was only temporary. She’s a big girl now – why, she’ll be five this summer – and her big school, much bigger than Elliott’s, was pulling out all the stops for carnival. It was going to involve the whole of Hoyo in the celebrations, by having the kids parade through the town, in costume. The weather forecast for the day itself, however, was highly unfavourable, and weather forecasts are often right in Spain as they are far more seldom in Britain (indeed, it chucked it down). So the parade had to be postponed. Only postponed, though, not cancelled.

Matilda got her festivities the following week (which sadly meant I missed them). In a costume at least as wonderful as Sheena prepared for Elliott. Hers was on a woodland theme and it worked beautifully. 

Matilda in her carnival procession

Matilda got a kick out of parading around her village in it, with all her schoolmates.

The kids and their bikes

Bikes, you may remember, are a key factor of the kids’ lives. And these days they just seem to get keyer and keyer. During my February stay, Matilda and Elliott were frequently on bikes on our school runs. That was pretty impressive. And it would have been even more impressive had they entirely mastered the process. The problem is that getting to school is mostly uphill, and mostly pretty steep. 

We, the grandparents, cheat. We have electric bikes. With them you can sit at the bottom of the steepest, longest hill you can imagine, and feel entirely undaunted. You know that you can sail up it, pedalling with minimal effort, as your source of external power takes the strain from your legs.

Now, I discovered that the grandkids cheat too. Well, Elliott especially. To be fair, he’s still not three, which is the manufacturer’s specified minimum age for his bike. So he’s doing extremely well to be riding to school at all. Perhaps it’s not unreasonable that he, too, relies on an external source of power to help get him to the top. Unfortunately for me, however, that external drive is grandad-powered. That brought back to me all the horror of the long, steep slope that I believed I’d put behind me thanks to my electric bike.

The way back down, at the end of the school day, is a lot easier. Matilda handles that just fine. At the time of my visit, however, Elliott still had a little progress to make. He understands how brakes work. He’ll even slow himself with them from time to time. But the use of brakes hasn’t yet become instinctive. So when there was a need to stop quickly, he still tended to rely on scraping his shoes along the ground. That worked, I grant him that. But when holes started to appear in his shoes, the technique lost any appeal it may ever have had for the parents (or the grandfather, come to that).

Children like rituals. Or at any rate habits. One of Elliott’s is to hide each time we get to his house.

Now the notion of ‘hiding’ is still a work in progress for him. He always goes to the same place. Well, I suppose that rather underlines the ritualistic aspect of the exercise. Nor has he entirely grasped the notion of ‘hiding’ as ‘making yourself invisible’. He gets most of himself behind a pillar but then peeks out to make sure that we’re all ready to react appropriately.

This happens when he leaps out with a bit of a shout. Nothing too intimidating. A lion’s roar, but more on the cub scale than that of the king of the Savannah.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I always react with startled shock, throwing up my hands in horror and shouting, ‘so that’s where you were!’. My reward is a beaming smile which never fails to make its appearance.

Nor was cycling the only form of exercise in which the kids indulged while I was there. Nicky, their dad, has returned to rock climbing, a sport to which he was devoted in his teens. Already back then, his devotion excited my admiration, as he cycled half an hour each way through dark, cold streets in the winter, to get to a climbing gym in the south of Strasbourg, where we lived at the time, after a full day’s school and school days are full indeed in France (often he got out only at 6:00). That happened three times a week, a level of commitment I haven’t seen in a great many teenagers.

Daddy back with an old passion

Well, he doesn’t go so often these days. Family man, and all that. And the presidency of the Hoyo chess club also makes its demands on his time. But he goes and sometimes he even takes the kids.

Elliott enjoys himself, but he tends to spend most of his time on a climb which, as his dad rather dismissively but far from inaccurately put it, is a bit like a ladder. The fun thing about it is that you get to the top and then come back down by a slide. You can imagine the attraction, an attraction felt by Matilda too.

She, however, has now graduated to proper climbs. I watched her more than once struggling up one of them, helped on her way by her dad, and felt she wasn’t doing badly. But imagine my astonishment when, a while later, noticing that she wasn’t near me, I went around the corner to where the climb she’d struggled with was located, to find her on it again – and not at the bottom, but right at the top. She’d climbed it on her own and without assistance. 

Matilda reaches the top. Unassisted

Naturally, I fetched Nicky at once while she waited, and when we were together, we saluted her achievement with suitable applause. She seemed pleased. As for us, we were downright impressed.

Especially Granddad. 

And a postscript

Matilda’s very attached to the mug she was given by her friend Eduardo at his third birthday party. So when it came to leaving a cup of milk for Father Christmas’s visit, back in December, and Sheena suggested using that mug, Matilda was a little concerned.

‘Let’s not,’ she said, ‘he might steal it.’

Too precious to risk

Wise girl, I say. Why trust a guy who sneaks into your house at night? A little caution seems fully called for.