Our daughter and son in law are having a baby boy! The baby is due at the end of March, which will be here before we know it!
I’ve had some to let this sink in, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. Grandmas are OLD. They wear polyester clothes, perm their hair and wear too much perfume. They carry big pocketbooks that are filled with kleenex, gum and lipstick. That’s not ME!
Then I think back and realize that my grandma’s weren’t that much older than me when I was born. They were just grandmas in the 70s, a time when Polaroid cameras, brown and orange clothes and heavy make up was fashionable. Looking back on our photo albums everyone looked older and made bad wardrobe decisions!
My generation of Grandmas are different. We grew up listening to the music of Michael Jackson, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Prince and Queen. We saw women go to space! We worked to equally support our families. We raised our kids to know it was perfectly fine for girls to play with footballs and nerf guns and boys to play with kitchen stuff. We tried to break stereotypes and increase acceptance. We are the first generation of parents that had home computers and had to navigate the added complications of parenting with them.
So it’s only natural that grandmas my age are going to be more tech savvy! Plus we have something that no other generation had. SOCIAL MEDIA! We are the women who joined Facebook when it started 10 years ago and have watched each others kids grow up. And now we are doing the same thing with our grandkids.
My grandbaby will be 4 hours away which is going to be hard. But I know we will see each other as often as possible and I know I will get lots of pictures and videos from my daughter. (I mean I get at least a dozen puppy pictures every week and those are her pets!)
And as soon as our grandson is old enough he is going to come stay with us for 2 weeks every summer. I’m already excited about that. We will go swimming, hiking, fishing, explore lighthouses, bake cookies and take a lot of silly pictures. We will listen to music and read books and go on road trips. I can’t wait to be called “Gram”!
I’m going to be a blue jean wearing, top down, music up kind of Grandma. There will be no polyester in sight. But I probably will have gum and kleenex!
Simply Shannone 