Baby Boomer Grandparent

Moving day is over and although every room has a little more furnitire in it than necessary, the beds are made and the clothes have all been put away. Now comes the hard part. How do we handle dinners and discipline and household chores and laundry?  When you invite your children to come back home for whatever reason (in this case a bad housing market) you can’t make them feel as if they are imposing. It is very important to let them know that this is their home now also.  With a few simple ground rules laid out in advance, eveyone can feel comfortable.

Because all of the adults work, dinner was the first problem we tackled.  One meal was prepared but the options of cooking time, eating together, feeding the children something else or saving some for the next night were handled on a day to day basis.  If the grandchildren had activities after school, the grandparents  ate alone and our children fixed a meal for their family when they come home.  Everyone cleans up after themselves.  After four weeks this has been working out fine.  One caveat – let the parents decide how much and what the grandchildren must eat before being excused from the table. A clean plate means different things at different ages.

Since the number of bathrooms does not pose a problem in our home, taking showers did not become a problem.  We all agreed to load the dishwasher and run it once a day.  Whoever arrived home first emptied it.

Grocery shopping created a little problem until we decided to clear enough pantry space for all the snacks and goodies that come along with young children.  (Papa also gave a quick course in not wasting food – don’t buy it if you’re not going to use it within the week)  Because our daughter-in-law works for him, she adopted this motto quickly.

Now most of us would not babysit our grandchildren every night and that should not change just because you are so handy. However, on any night we did not have plans, we offered to babysit so our children could go to a movie or have dinner out alone.  To their credit this was never abused.

In their own home, they entertained regularly and  the other grandparents visited often.  We managed to work this out so they could visit with friends in private on the evenings or days when we had plans to be away.  The other grandparents were welcome anytime.

It didn’t take long for us to be in a routine that I think (they can blog me and confirm or deny this) worked for all of us.

Now about the hard part  Mom and Dad make the rules.  You can get away with a lot of things with your grandchildren when they visit occassionally but when they live with you you need to step back and let the parents be in charge. When that little face looks up at you and asks to stay up later, you smile and say “what did Mom say.” We had a few tearful moments (some mine, some theirs) but we followed through with the rules and as of this moment I am happy to report that we are One Big Happy Family.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 12:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.