Strollerderby : grandpa

Father's Day Book Pick: Buy Grandpa Time

JeanneSager — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:33:00 GMT

I've always been a fan of kids books for adults on holidays - especially grandparents who can very well buy themselves everything they've ever wanted . . . except time with the grandkids.

Just in time for Father's Day, Kristy Dempsey's Me With You offers grandpas plenty of time to cuddle on the couch with their favorite little munchkin.

A grandcub finds she's comfy just being herself with grandpa bear leading the way, in a story that's filled with gorgeous illustrations and the types of things grandfathers and grandkids do best (picking flowers, playing baseball, you name it . . .). Celebrating the special relationship between grandpas and grandkids, Me With You solves the bigger question - is there anything I can get him for Father's Day that he'll actually use?

How about time with his grandkids?

It's time they'll be looking back on when they paw through his shelves in twenty years so you can read it to their kids.

Though it's technically the tale of a girl cub, the story doesn't have a clear gender and some of the pictures are gender-neutral, which allows the book to find a wider audience. The simple rhymes put this at the earlier end of the four-to-eight age group recommended by publisher Penguin, but kids who enjoy snuggling up to grandpa will overlook the story and just enjoy the ride.

Check out the "video trailer" for the book and get it from Amazon!

Image: Amazon

When Grandma Wants to Be 'Glamma'

Jen Chaney — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:28:00 GMT

As Shirley MacLaine made abundantly clear in "Terms of Endearment," not everyone immediately gets jazzed about being dubbed a grandmother. It's a signal that you are undeniably, unequivocally old, the sort of person who keeps a pair of square-framed glasses perched at the tip of her nose and has lengthy conversations about arthritis pain.

But as the Wall Street Journal reports, some Baby Boomer grandparents are rejecting the dentures-and-early-bird-dinner trap. How? By refusing to call themselves Grandpa, Grandma, Granny, Bubbe or any of those other Oldy McOlderson monikers that stand in stark contrast to the forever-young attitude of their generation. Some of the alternatives they're going with: Papa Doc (for a grandfather who happens to be a doctor), Coco (an homage to Coco Chanel) and -- for my money, the most ridiculous -- Glamma, the "glam" version of Grandma.

I have no problem with bucking tradition. I also completely understand why someone might want to put his or her personal stamp on grandparenthood. But at the same time, it seems a bit absurd to try to "young up" that important new role. I mean, Glamma? Really? Something about that choice reminds me of those 57-year-old woman who still try to shop in the juniors department. It seems to me there must be a way to stay young at heart and age gracefully, but still acknowledge the fact that you are, indeed, aging.

Then again, this could be one of those things that's all about context. When you personally know the people choosing these nicknames, and they aren't being depicted in an article that lumps them together with all those stubborn Baby Boomer stereotypes, their choices might seem much less inane. Plus, 25 years from now -- when I decide to call myself Super Nana -- I might find Glamma much less goofy.

But what do you think? Do you know any grandparents who have given themselves hipper sounding names? Do you embrace the idea or think Grandma and Grandpa still works just fine?

Image: senior-monitor.com

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Grandpa Hires Hitman So He Can Visit Granddaughter

JeanneSager — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

How can you say no to a Grandpa who just wants to see his little granddaughter? When he's the type of guy who'd hire a hitman to rough you up for it, I'd say you have some pretty good grounds.

David Ward of Pacific, Missouri, has been accused of hiring a hitman to beat up his daughter, providing him with the woman's address and pictures so he could identify her in a crowd.

Ward told police he didn't want his daughter dead. He just wanted to see his granddaughter. Police say Ward was charged four years ago for assaulting the daughter - likely the reason she severed ties between child and Grandpa.

The details out on this story make it pretty clear Ward's daughter made the right move in cutting Dad out of the picture. But most of us have parents who drive us up the wall (and don't hire hitmen) - have you ever considered cutting them out of your child's life?

They're flesh and blood, but they're also not parents, so they don't have the rights that we do. Still, I watch my daughter running around with her grandparents, and she is absolutely idolized. Grandparents usually offer a different kind of love - because they don't have to do the discipline and clean-up later. Grandparents often do a better job with their grandkids than they did with their own kids too, either because they're older and more experienced or simply have the luxury of not worrying about the parenting aspect of it all.

Then again, grandparents spoil kids and send them home. They let them eat lollipops at nine p.m., and three nights later, our kids are throwing a tantrum because we say "no lollipops." They let our kids jump on the bed even though they would have tanned our (metaphorical) hides if we'd even glanced at the bed. They tell us how to parent, and they "tut, tut" when we don't follow up.

Sometimes, our parents aren't the best people for us to have around. Sometimes we just suck it up for our kids (so they can grow up, have kids, and we can be the pains in the ass later).

Image: DailyMail

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Gramps Goes Christmas Crazy with 20,000 Santas

JeanneSager — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:58:00 GMT

Jean-Guy Laquerre really likes Christmas. No, we mean he REALLY likes Christmas.The grandfather from Boucherville, Canada has cornered the market on Santa spirit with more than twenty thousand of them.

The retired teacher has been named as the biggest collector of Santa Claus memorabilia on the entire planet, earning his place in the Guinness World Records for 2009.

It all started with a papier mache Santa, to this day his favorite in the collection. But Grandpa Jean-Guy has moved on to inflatable Santas for the outside, Kriss Kringle shower curtains and Father Christmas pie plates (check out the photo gallery of some of his favorites at the Mirror). There are stuffed Santas and Santa statues, Santas for the tree and Santas set up in front of the TV.

And somehow, his grandkids aren't embarrased by all this Father Christmas fervor. Perhaps the craziest (and sweetest) piece of this Christmas story is the response of Jean-Guy's sixteen-year-old grandson and nine-year-old granddaughter. They invite their friends over to check out Grandpa's collection!

Image: The Mirror

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Say Hi To Grandma Through the Screen

JeanneSager — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:28:00 GMT

My three-year-old likes to show her grandparents her nursery school projects. Too bad they're in Virginia, and we're in New York. Seeing a construction paper elephant is a tough job when you're looking through a phone line. We're still working on that.

But if an article in yesterday's New York Times is any indication, there may soon be a nation of toddlers who never have to use adjectives to tell Grandma about their new artistic creations. Grandma and Grandpa have gone digital so they can keep up with their grandkids living half a world away.

With half of American grandparents living at least two hundred miles from their grandchildren (according to the AARP) and two-thirds of kids seeing at least one set of grandparents only once a year, Web cams are stepping into the void to make sure kids feel that family connection. Some parents even use on-screen Grandma as a remote babysitter, setting their kids up in front of the computer to chat while they get some work done around the house.

With my in laws living so far away, their biggest fear seems to be that my daughter will forget them. They once handed me a picture of them - so she doesn't forget us, they said. We make sure that doesn't happen with weekly phone calls, and we bring them up in regular conversation. She runs to them when they arrive just as quickly as she does my parents, who live across town and talk to her on the phone even more often (what can I say, my side of the family tends to have bigger mouths!). We haven't purchased a Web cam yet, but it is a temptation. My in-laws will want to see the first loose tooth, the First Communion dress. A photographer by trade, I take pictures of these things, but I don't always have the energy to actually get them online and e-mailed four states away.

One expert quoted in the article said she worries grandparents will get too hooked on what technology offers; that they'll be tempted to visit less because they've already "seen" the grandkids. I kind of doubt it. The kind of grandparent who would power up their computer just to get a look at that cute little monkey is the kind of grandparent who would be there in a heartbeat . . . if they could.

A kid bouncing around in front of a camera has nothing on a kid wrapping their arms around you.

Image: New York Times

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Video: Old People Choir Singing Gangsta Hip Hop

Cole Gamble — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 18:30:00 GMT

As a parent, I’d like to think I’m reasonable cool. I can only hope as a grandparent I’ll be cool enough to sing OutKast, MC Hammer and Chamillionaire.Hopefully I'll be as cool as these octegenarians:

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McCain Campaign Verbally Abuses an Innocent Child

Cole Gamble — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:31:00 GMT

This wretched story comes from the Daily Kos, in which a politically excited kid gets his ass handed to him by the sinister folks at McCain HQ:

I’m fairly certain the story I’m about to relate happened when I was in 6th grade, an age at which I was old enough to appreciate what was happening, but now sufficiently eroded away in my memory to preclude a perfect recall of the event.

The assignment was a grade school perennial: Write to our local Congressperson or Senator. If he wrote back? Extra credit. So I took my #2 pencil in my chubby fingers and applied it with an unmistakably adolescent scrawl to a sheet of wide-ruled, three-hole punched notebook paper.

“Dear Senator McCain,” I began; I probably picked McCain because he had recently been “promoted” from the House to the Senate, and his name was in the news. I wasn’t – at 11 or 12 – what you could call “politically engaged.” I don’t think I knew what the ideological differences between the parties were. I mean, to be honest, I didn’t know much of anything. I just wanted to finish my homework before Spenser: For Hire started.

So I filled the rest of the two “body” paragraphs of the letter with whatever semi-coherent content my preteen mind could generate. I don’t remember the line by line specifics, but a few words and phrases stand out in my memory from the time – words and phrases I was particularly pleased with being able to use at the time, as I was fairly certain they made me sound more grown-up and politically aware than I actually was at the time:

“Constituencies”

“Partisan gridlock”

“Reach across the aisle”

String these three items together and you get the picture: I exhorted him (although I didn’t know that word at the time) to “reach across the aisle” and fight against “partisan gridlock” on behalf of his “constituencies” at home in the great state of Arizona.

As I said: No great indication of a developing political mind— but what could one honestly expect from someone who was saving up his allowance to buy Serpentor?

I mailed my letter and all but forgot about it.

Several weeks later, during dinner, the phone rang. I remember that I answered the call. I don’t remember the name of the youngish-sounding guy on the other end of the phone (in the tall-tale version of this story it would be Mark Salter), but I remember where he worked.

“This is ___ from Senator McCain’s office. Can I talk to Jeffrey, please?

“This is he.”

What follows is, as best as I can reconstruct from my memory, the remainder of the call in its entirety. Once he started speaking, I didn’t say a word.

“Well, Jeffrey, I received your letter to Senator McCain, and I wanted to respond to you. First of all, the Senator has one constituency, the residents of the State of Arizona—not multiple constituencies, as you wrote.”

“Also, since the Senator just arrived in the Senate, he has not been a part of the problem of “partisan gridlock” you write about. What’s more, if you had done your research, you would see that while he was in the House of Representatives, Senator McCain made it a point to “reach across the aisle” on multiple occasions, just as your letter would have him do.”

“I can tell you’re a kid and everything, but if you ever want to be taken seriously you should you get your facts straight, especially before you write a letter like this.”

I think I said, “Okay, thanks,” before he hung up on me. That was it.

“What the hell was that?” I thought to myself.

Whatever my expectations had been for that assignment, one thing I didn’t expect was to be taken to task for my (admittedly middling) effort at engaging with my government. I remember feeling as though I had just been kicked in the gut, or had my pants pulled down by a bully from an older class — neither of which were entirely foreign experiences to me at the time.

I also recall being astonished at the fact that whoever this guy was, he apparently had nothing better to do than call up a grade-schooler during dinner and yell at him. As the schoolyard saying went at the time, I wondered “Who had piddled on his Post Toasties that morning?”

Now, I’m not defending my letter. Clearly, I hadn’t done the homework to do my homework. But it’s not like there was an Internet to research anyone’s congressional voting record back then, and the assignment simply wasn’t worth enough, points-wise, to justify coercing my Mom into taking me to the library (which she would have done).

The perturbed call from McCain’s office actually did teach me a valuable lesson in “not talking out of my butt.” However, I’m certain I could have learned that same lesson, given the same set of circumstances, without the meanness. Since then, I’ve dealt with kids in a variety of capacities (student teacher, camp counselor, etc.) and I can say that, no matter how dumb they act, you’re never supposed to treat them like they’re stupid.

Mainly, I recall this experience as one of those childhood moments—certainly not my proudest—that sticks around in your memory because, even if you’re just a stupid kid, you can see right through a so-called grown-up’s behavior:

At that moment, I knew that he handled the call poorly.

I marveled at the fact that I had been yelled at for using a word (”constituencies”) that I knew I had used properly. I mean, conceivably, weren’t kids one constituency and adults another? Men one, women another? Goldwater Republicans and Udall Democrats? Constituencies.

But mostly, I wondered what sort of jerk Senator McCain must have been to inspire his staff to achieve such levels of jerkiness?

Twenty-something years later, Senator McCain’s conduct during his presidential campaign has provided me with the answer to that question: Whether he’s furiously taking exception with the assertions of mendacity by the Des Moines Register or referring to his distinguished colleague from the Senate and opponent in his race for the nation’s highest office as “That one,” one thing is clear about Senator McCain.

He’s exactly the sort of guy who would tell one of his minions to rough up a naive 12-year-old constituent by phone.

In short, not much has changed since then… Except the shows on Prime time.

In related news, Obama smells like rainbows and unicorns.

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