I just got back from a road trip with my 2 year-old granddaughter, our first ever. I sincerely hope it isn't our last. I also sincerely hope that she will be older when we do it again. Because 1) she will hopefully remember it better and 2) it won't be so physically exhausting. The exhaustion part was as much about the weather as about her energy.
You see, we were stuck in a condo with little outdoor time due to rainy, gloomy, icky weather. The many games and toys I had brought got old really quickly. I had coloring books, markers, magnetic letters, books, animal card games ad nauseum. The most favorite game? Her Leap Frog. I was very grateful to her mom for packing it. She is, after all, a child of the 21st century and is more facile with it than I am with my laptop.
We had maybe two minor meltdowns. I don't think she was feeling well after a long car trip. We sang the Itsy-Bitsy Spider and I'm a Little Teapot and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star like 60 times. I didn't feel so hot after that either. But singing in the car was one way my family passed the time when on long car trips, so in a way it was carrying on a tradition.
I did get to give her some new experiences.
We saw mountains and added that word to her vocabulary. We drove through the Smokies and saw "fog", which she conflated with "frog" and said "ribbit, ribbit". (You should try it sometime...try to describe and point to fog, in a way that a 2 yo can understand!) We saw different colored trees. (It was October along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokey Mountains, a trip everyone should have on their bucket list) We went through not one but two TUNNELS!!!Another vocab addition. She kept asking for more tunnels, as if in her mind, Grammer had conjured up the other ones and could easy build another tunnel with her mind power. It is lovely to think of myself as a super hero in her eyes.
On the way there, she asked "Back to Grammer's house?" I replied that we were going someplace different. She started to whine "Jumping on the bed"...an activity she greatly enjoys at my house. I assured her that, while we weren't going to Grammer's house, there were beds to be jumped on at the condo. Okay, then...fine by her.
There are few attractions in the wilds of Tennessee. We spent most of an afternoon looking for the "World's Largest Tree House". When we finally found it, it was no longer open to the public and frankly, one couldn't tell from a distance that it WAS a tree house. Sure, there were trees growing up through it, but the foundations was very much grounded on the ground. We had to rearrange, due to nap timing, a trip to a restored Homestead WPA-built house/museum, only to arrive after it was closed.
She didn't cry for her mom or dad but she talked to her mom on the phone about tunnels and mountains and swimming. (She adores swimming and the complex where we stayed sported an indoor pool.) She has patience I would not expect of a Terrible Two...and that is both a good thing and a bad thing. She was patient, spending many hours in the car with a few breaks. She was patient in asking for M&M's which, for some strange reason, she called "beans". She asked patiently for "beans" a lot. She also patiently asked for "cereal" over and over again until I gave her some, despite the fact that I was trying to pack the car and we were going to Shoney's for breakfast buffet before hitting the road. Miracle of miracles, they had "fairy cakes" (her word for mini cupcakes) at the breakfast buffet.
I tried not to fulfill all her requests for sweets, having had a few battles with my mother-in-law over the amount of sweets she gave my two sons. I try to balance spoiling her, which is after all the prerogative of grandparents, with following her parents' guidance over what they allow and what they disallow. They ARE her parents when all is said and done.
Mostly, she and Aunt Lynn and I spent the time just hanging out in the condo, musing about the golfers parading past our window in a steady drizzle and using sidewalk chalk on the wet deck and chatting about how brilliant my granddaughter is. I have envied my sister for YEARS, envied her her smart, beautiful grandchildren and the fact that she has lived with 2 of the 4 grandchildren she has. I must confess, I really enjoyed showing off MY smart, beautiful grandchild and letting Auntie to get to know her just a little. And I am oh, so grateful for my son and daughter-in-law, that they loved me and loved her enough to trust me with their treasure.
I have memories now, of seeing the Fall put on a show for us and watching her sleep and trying not to give her too many "beans" and jumping on the bed (of course, I HAD to fulfill that promise) and playing with Playdoh on the coffee table and making numerous trips up and down the stairs to rescue Bear and get diapers. (I never seemed to have everything I needed on the level we were on, probably because I live in a one-story house and don't usually have to plan trips up and down stairs. It was a good workout for me.)
I hope, oh, I so hope, she will have memories too...of mountains in full color and rain for the trees to drink and tunnels and time spent with me. And I hope they are all good.
