Immersion grandparenting

Hammocks are fun, says Matilda

Since the grandkids are with us again, with their parents in tow, it struck me that I’d better get a move on with telling the story from back in February, of their most recent previous visit, when the parents weren’t in tow. Well, they were in tow enough to have one of them bring the kids to us and another pick them up four days later. That gave them (the parents) the chance to have a well-deserved weekend break together for the first time for, oh, centuries. In between we had the kids on our own.

That’s ‘immersion grandparenting’. With them alone, keeping them amused, out of trouble and away from danger, is down to us with no one to take over if (sorry, when) we get tired. It’s grandparenting without a net. Much the most exciting, if not a little exhausting, kind.

The kids are fine with us on their own these days. Matilda did mention on a couple of occasions that she’d like Mummy to give her a cuddle before she went to sleep, but it was without any real sorrow and she shed no tears – it felt rather like a formal protest as though to say that she wanted it on record that she missed her parents and, though she could cope with grandparental care for a short while, we weren’t to believe that she saw this as any kind of long-term arrangement.

When it came to entertaining them, my thanks are due to Matilda who came up with an excellent suggestion. There was a film she wanted to watch. Slightly thrown by her idiosyncratic pronunciation of the first syllable of the title, I spent some fruitless time looking for ‘Papa Troll’ which, you’ve got to admit, doesn’t sound like an impossible title for a kids’ film. It turns out that what she wanted was the second Paw Patrol film. To be honest, I wasn’t aware that there’d been a first film but, hey, you learn a lot from being with grandkids.

The price of the film was, I felt, reasonable. It was around eight euros. But the excellence of the economics only became fully apparent once we realised how often the kids could watch it. The price per child per viewing worked out at around ten cents, which is unbeatable value. And, when they finally decided they’d had enough of it, I’m glad to say I found Paw Patrol 1, at an even lower price, and again providing hours of entertainment.

Beach fun in February, with Elliott (l) and Matilda

Apart from the films, there’s one aspect to being with us in Valencia that the kids continue to perceive as outstandingly advantageous. I mean, apart from playing on the beach in February. That’s ice cream every day. At home, ice cream’s a luxury, available only on rare special occasions. So having ice cream every day is a kind of anticipated preview of heaven. 

There's playground fun to be had at the beach too

Also in Valencia, while the kids do have their own bikes, the alternative is to travel on kids’ seats on ours. This is a great source of pleasure. Since kids like rituals, there are of course traditions associated with these bike rides. For instance, on one occasion I was out with Elliott on the back of my bike, and we’d been gone some ten minutes when he suddenly piped up from the back, ‘why no bumpity-bump?’ 

Bumpity-bump is what we do when we go over what the English, in their cruel way, refer to as sleeping policemen, though technically I think they’re called traffic-calming measures. You know, those bumps in the road that are designed to slow motorists. I call out ‘bumpity’ as we hit one on a bike, and ‘bump’ when we come off the other side. He echoes the calls. Matilda does the same, I might add, whether on my bike or Danielle’s.

Well, on that occasion I’d gone ten minutes and crossed several bumps but without any bumpity-bumps. Elliott was, rightly, reminding me of the ritual which I had, quite honestly, forgotten. I remembered it for the rest of the ride. 

Making their own entertainment:
Elliott housecleaning, Matilda mastering colouring

Talking about Elliott, and specifically about Elliott talking, it’s time for me to admit that there are those in my family who rather question my prediction that he would be a strong silent type. It’s true that his sometimes-unquenchable loquacity might be seen as undermining my sense of his quietness. No one, mind you, questions his strength: seldom have I seen a kid who’ll pick himself up from pretty much any fall with so little apparent concern or spilling of tears. His sister’s pretty tough too, treating her own injuries – and of the two grandkids she’s the only one to have broken a bone or suffered a burn – with philosophical courage once the first shock has passed. But his resilience even at the time of the accident is remarkable. This suggests that Elliott’s as strong as I maintain, and his general willingness to take pain without complaint might even seem to prove my belief that he’s strong and silent, were it not that he has developed a readiness (how shall I put this) to be outspoken on other occasions and matters. A readiness he exercises frequently and at length.

Interestingly, his handling of language has apparently reached a new stage. He’s decided he doesn’t like qualifiers. ‘Lovely Elliott’, as Danielle inadvertently described him on one occasion, received the response ‘just Elliott’. He had no time for the expression ‘fresh orange juice’ either, insisting that what he was about to drink was simply ‘orange juice’. I’d be inclined to say that he had an admirable commitment to concision, if I didn’t expect him to correct that to ‘just commitment to concision’. 

While he’s become good at expressing himself, he hasn’t developed quite the same level of attachment to the process of listening. Or at any rate listening and obeying. It was biking that brought that out again, in a dramatic fashion. Danielle and I were about to take them out on our bikes, much to their delight – they like the bike seats and enjoying going ‘bumpity-bump’ on them to one or other playground (we’re becoming experts on the respective advantages and disadvantages of all the playgrounds anywhere near us, and quite a few that aren’t). Our brand of bike has a design flaw, which is that it has a built-in lock but, if we set the lock with a pedal next to the kickstand, it becomes impossible to unlock. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I had to lock my bike and then unlock it again before we set out. As I was getting everything done, Elliott came trotting over, making a beeline for a pedal.

‘Don’t move the pedal!’ I cautioned him.

He looked up, smiled, and moved the pedal. That lined it up neatly with the kickstand just as the bike emitted the ominous clicking sound which told me it was now locked. And that was the end of our projected excursion, since I could no longer unlock the bike. Indeed, it took me three weeks, including emails to the support service of the company that built the bikes. That’s not as straightforward as it one was, since the company has gone broke and been bought up by another. Eventually, a helpful person in the service kindly told me the (actually quite simple) solution to the problem and I could start using my bike again.

To be strictly honest, that’s not the only aspect of Elliott’s behaviour these days that can be – let me put this carefully – a little tiring. You can tell him – ask him, beg him – to do something, or more to the point, not to do something, and he’ll blissfully go on refusing to do what he should or, more to the point, refrain from doing what he shouldn’t. At one point, I got so annoyed that I couldn’t prevent myself making clear to him my displeasure (verbally, I hasten to add, only verbally). 

Actually, to be entirely truthful, that happened more than once.

‘Come on, David,’ Danielle told me, ‘he isn’t three yet. Stop expecting him to behave like an adult.’

I felt like getting a little picky and pointing out that, actually, I knew a lot of adults as impervious to rational requests as Elliott. It’s probably just as well, for my own wellbeing, that I thought better of saying so.

The best response to a burst of annoyance on my part, however, came inevitably from Elliott himself. He’s someone who generally resist any attempt of mine to kiss him (‘I don’t want a kiss,’ he frequently informs me with firmness). On this occasion, however, faced with my obvious irritation, he looked at me wistfully and said:

‘I’d like a kiss.’

How can any anger resist a request so disarming? Mine evaporated. Such is the power, I suppose, of one who’s certainly a strong type but perhaps all the stronger for not being entirely a silent one.

Having fun in Valencia can be exhausting for everyone

Grandparenting summer

It’s been a good summer, enriched by some immersion grandparenting.

That included two short experiments that together represented a big step forward in our grandparenting practice. Twice over the summer, the grandkids stayed with us for two nights, without their parents. And it worked out well. On each occasion, there was one night when Elliott woke up and demanded attention, but not for too long either time. On the other night of each stay, both kids slept right through. 

The time will come when they can stay with us for a longer period, giving their parents a break and, who knows, maybe even allowing us to take them on holiday somewhere. Perhaps to France. They both hold French nationality and, in a statement of surprising understanding, Matilda has let us know she wants to be better acquainted with the country and its language. When Danielle and I first met, it was French that we spoke to each other, and occasionally we fall into it again.

“Why are you speaking French?” Matilda often challenges us if she hears it.

It impresses me that she even recognises the language. And I can’t help feeling that behind her comment lies the implication, “I don’t want to be left out, I want to understand”. We’ll have to see what we can do when she’s a little older.

Matilda on her pedal bike
You think she doesn’t look happy? She wasn’t.
Her words after I took this picture were, “I don’t want photos.”

The big thing this summer has been the bikes. As I explained before, Matilda received her first pedal bike for her birthday in August. It’s quite clear that using a balance bike, the kind that has kids pushing themselves along with their feet on the ground, teaches them how to cycle much more effectively than using a pedal bike with training wheels. That was certainly clear when I saw her last week, at her home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid. She’s mastered both getting started (while with us, she still needed a push) and stopping (she now uses a brake and gets her feet on the ground, instead of falling over pretty much every time she came to a halt). And, boy, does she get some speed up in between.

Matilda running on the rocks outside her school

“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

The real problem is that Elliott, who has always wanted to do anything that Matilda could do, at the same time as she learned to do it – walking, running, talking – naturally wants to use a pedal bike too, even though he isn’t quite two and a half years old yet. His dad bought one for him, but he bought it from someone near us in Valencia, and it’s at our place until we find a way of getting it to him. In the meantime, Elliott has to beg his sister for some time to use her bike. When he does get to use it, he’s quite remarkable – I timed him keeping going for ten or fifteen minutes. That may be partly because he hasn’t yet fully mastered stopping, but it’s still remarkable.

Matilda’s pedal bike
“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

Language is the other area where the kids have bowled me over. Their mastery of Spanish can only leave me consumed by envy. But their English also just gets better and better, not just in the words but in the thinking behind them. 

“I like coming to Valencia,” Matilda told me.

I felt quite flattered, a feeling that lasted only until she could finish her remark.

“Because,” she went on, “we get ice cream every day here.”

There was ice cream on only one occasion last week, when I was with them. That’s ‘parents’ rules’. Sheena, my daughter-in-law, tells me that she regards us as applying ‘grandparents’ rules’. The latter are seriously more grandchild indulgent (and possibly grandparent-peace-purchasing).

The other enjoyable thing about being in our place is that they get to see trains going by from time to time. They call each one they see a ‘chu-chu-bahnele’, which is the equivalent in Danielle’s mother tongue, Alsatian, of what we might call a choo-choo-train. 

For the avoidance of confusion, Alsatian in this context has nothing to do with a breed of dogs, and everything to do with the language spoken in Danielle’s birth region of Alsace, in Eastern France.

Why do I find the use of Alsatian so enjoyable? Because it was what Danielle used when pointing out trains to our kids, when they were of that age. And she used it with our friends’ kids too. 

Now Elliott will cry out “chu-chu-bahnele” whenever we see so much as the railway track (well, strictly speaking it’s a metro track, but it feels like a railway since it’s all above ground near where we live. He doesn’t make the distinction, so nor do we). 

As it happens, with him the fascination seems to be just part of a general interest in alternative means of travel to cars.

“Plane! Plane!” he’ll say whenever he sees or hears one passing overhead.

They’re both beginning to grasp some of the subtler distinctions of language. For instance, they never want anything. They always need it. After all, a want can be denied. But a need? Well, it just has to be satisfied, doesn’t it? 

That slippage between terms, by the way, is by no means limited to children.

Chupa chups, as they call them, or lollipops as I would, are the object of one of those needs. Fulfilled, it creates considerable delight. It was, on one occasion, even under parents’ rules, in Hoyo, while I was there. 

Chupa chup moment, with Michael-Michael
After Edward Hopper

The event gave me the opportunity to take a photo of them in pensive enjoyment of their Chupa chup moment, along with a highly welcome visitor, their Uncle Michael. Or Michael-Michael, as they continue to call him. The moment with him and their chupa-chups gave me the opportunity to take a photo I felt had a bit of the wistful, enigmatic mood of an Edward Hopper painting to it.

The moment also has rarity value. A visit by Michael-Michael is received with such unconfined joy that, as a rule, we would certainly not apply words like peaceful to the scene that ensues.

High delight - literally, too - when Michael-Michael visits

And there were other special moments for the kids in the course of the summer. Their Granny flew down to join us from her home in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Matilda enjoying her granny’s presence

It was with their granny that they got to satisfy yet another need, the well-known requirement of the human soul to bathe from time to time in foam. A fine way to spend a little time on a hot summer day. As Granny can testify.

Matilda revelling in the foam

Granny can testify to the enjoyment

The heat, of course, was one of the major aspects of the summer, with global warming seeming to go right on in its inexorable way. That, I’m sure, was one of the things that made the foam so welcome, just like the swimming pool and the sea. And the pleasure the kids took in all three made it all the more bearable for us too.

A fine summer, as I said, despite the heat. The kind that leaves lots of great memories. All of which makes for what we’d call a good time all round, doesn’t it?

A rare moment of peace in an action-packed summer