Gratitude for being a grandparent

This is from an article in Medium by an author I read:

• What’s amazing to me is how consistent this struggle is among every parent I talk to. The texts and social media posts bouncing around my circle all echo each other. We feel like we’re failing at both. Our kids don’t just need us — they need more of us. Our kids are acting out, abandoning the routines they already had, dropping naps, sleeping less, doing less — except for jumping on top of their parents, which is happening much more. We’re letting them watch far greater amounts of screen time than we ever thought we’d tolerate. Forget homeschooling success — most of us are struggling to get our kids to do the basics that would have accounted for a Saturday-morning routine before this pandemic.

What amazes me about this is the consistency the author conveys and what I see in my own, much smaller circle made up of people I either knew in high school or Bahá'ís I have known since the 1970s.

Namely, they are older and without at-home children. Often, as in my case, there is no spouse, no other human in the house.

We do not have to worry about homeschooling, keeping pre-teens from going crazy or damaging things (dogs, furniture, walls...themselves), and balancing whatever paid work there is with the necessity to give "enough" time to those children and perhaps a spouse.

A person I know is the parent of three children, all under the teenage years. There is a spouse and both parents have stay-at-home jobs now. The challenges my friend deals with are unlike anything in one's life experience. There are the stresses created by keeping children contained within a relatively small space (house and backyard), of keeping a large breed dog de-stressed by walking as often as possible, and dealing with a spouse's stressful new job, started just about the time the novel coronavirus began to make its presence felt.

There is very little 'downtime' for this new breed of parents. Considering this pandemic involves a novel coronavirus against which not one human on Earth has any immunity, there is no historical basis on which to rely; the decisions are far more frequent than day-to-day. They come minute-to-minute. There is no consistency; what worked an hour ago might fail now. There is no manual, no helpful book by an experienced pediatrician.

There is just the Now.

As I sit here in my own small cave, alone, writing these words, I am reminded that there was a time when I was one of those parents with a houseful of children, all needing attention, direction, guidance, and discipline. The difference, of course, is there was no novel coronavirus waiting to inflict incredible sickness on a body just around the corner.

My heart goes out to all parents with children, the children themselves, and the teachers who will have to deal with a wide variety of homeschooling results when they finally go back to school. The time between now and then will be stressful and chaotic for them.

I am glad I am a grandparent.

English: Love it or leave it. Apparently, we are leaving it.

Many writers on social media seem to have stopped using subjects in their sentences. Why? Here is an example:

"Not able to cover as much area as we wanted because it's so marshy/swampy up there. Possibly going up in the next couple weeks to rule out some more areas."

I believe we are already well on the way to forgetting how to use penmanship - how many young people use cursive after their school classes? - and if we keep this no-subject-used sentence structure, we will devolve as a species. The ability to use and evolve language is the one thing that really separates us from those species in the the lower Animal Kingdom and I am not sure we really want to evolve language as we seem to.

 

Already one of the most common - though I hesitate to use the word "popular" - subjects in a college freshman's curriculum is Remedial English. (That, of course, leads one to as what is being taught to students in pre-college school...but that is a topic we do not want to address lest we make young students feel less than Perfect In Every Way.)

How bunk beds make a man crazy

One of the major questions weighing heavily on my mind relates to bunk beds. Yes, those ubiquitous sleeping items found in many homes with young children and which, sometime, must be dealt with. Kids age out of them and they take up space. Thinking about the bunk beds in my own house makes me crazy. And I wonder...

What do I do with the bunk beds I have had since my now-adult children were much younger and all three of them slept in the same unisex bedroom, two girls on the bottom larger bunk and a son in the smaller twin upper bunk?

They are no longer small enough to sleep on them and their own children, my grandchildren, are the last to have used them... recently...but they are aging much too fast and soon be out of the unisex bedroom stage and will need rooms of their own when they visit.

Now, I am a saver of mementos, often to the consternation of my adult children; they think I save too much for too long, but honestly, that is one of the definite impossibilities in life! The thought of giving them away or selling them is a very difficult concept to imagine. 

I know the day is coming when I will have to ponder it for real, but maybe just another week or a year or twelve...?