There should be a playgroup for grandparents, particularly during the school holidays.
After all, if you glance around the shopping centres and the streets, there they are. Grey-headed grannies herding gleeful grandchildren about.
And yes, I am one of them.
I love my grandchildren. I value every moment with them and I am glad they like to hang out with me.
I love pushing them on the swing and hovering about as they scramble about in precarious positions, swaying slightly as they climb the many climbing things that they like to conquer. And yes, I am unreservedly a helicopter grandparent. Nothing can go wrong on my watch.
I like it when they ask questions and I like it even more that they listen to the answers. I like being silly with them. I like thinking of new things to do with food to make it fun and I don’t even mind the delicate balance between that ‘sometime’ food (a grandparent’s food playground) and that ‘always’ food (parent food).
It’s a dichotomy. Everyone knows it is our job to spoil our grandchildren. But the parents want us to do this in extreme moderation, not wanting to welcome home children who can climb walls. Why not?
But with mine now growing up a bit, there is less of the swing pushing and more of the eye averting when they are doing scary things at the park.
I have time to ponder life’s big questions. Big questions include what we might be having for dinner, how I can disguise vegetables and should I send them to the toilet now or wait until we get home.
All of a sudden, my grandchildren are only requiring my neurons ninety per cent of the time. Ah for that blissful 10 per cent.
I even made a work phone call recently while my six and seven-year-olds were making me pizza out of wet sand and a birthday cake with sticks for candles out of dry sand (it was delicious).
It is this 10 per cent that has made me think about grandparent Playgroup. Here are the mums in small huddles with their babies, ineffectively making their children balance a seesaw (siblings by their very nature are different ages and therefore different weights and really don’t belong on each end of a stick with two seats requiring careful and equal balance – or am I missing something?).
The mums either chat to each other or to whoever is on the other end of the phone, while we grannies keep guard of our cargo as if a child smuggling gang is ready to fall from the trees.
This is when I wish I had a grandma friend to share this time with.
I look at the woman on the seat nearby who is cutting the stalks off strawberries and ask her if I can borrow the knife, so I can do the same. We nod and smile and deliver the beheaded strawberries to our charges.
Perhaps I have found an incidental playgroup of sorts right here.
