Grandmas have all the fun

I’ve been contemplating what makes being a grandmother so great.

It’s the club you hear about for years, and you see the members — they’re really friendly — too friendly, really, and they want you to join. They tell you it’s THE BEST THING EVER. Still, we potential members have had kids, and while they were great off and on, there were some offs.

I remember being, according to my sons, the only mother who — fill in the blank — made them wear a bicycle helmet, wouldn’t let them say certain words, embarrassed them to death.

There were moments when they liked me, and I liked them a lot, most of the time. I loved them all the time, but it was a constant worry about whether I was doing it right. Was I too hard? Too permissive? Every time their friends came over, I gave out candy like it was Halloween. I let my then-16-year-old

go to Austria by himself. I let my younger son play lots of video games. I grounded one son from a special karate class when he smarted off one more time after I warned him, and then I had to watch him suffer. Like the saying goes, it hurt me worse than it hurt him, I’ll bet. I still think about it — does he?

Then my older son met a wonderful girl, and the members of the club got excited. Just wait! Being a grandmother is so much fun!

We got the news on Labor Day (how perfect) that a baby was coming in May, and I started my initiation. I even got presents, like the book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Grandmother.”

Oh, and when Kennedy Renette Keith finally came, it was amazing! First, you have to wrap your head around the fact that your baby had a baby.

My son, holding his just-minutes-old baby, called me through the window of the nursery, tears in his eyes. “She looks like us,” he said, meaning our side of the family.

I’d already picked out my grandmother name, Mimi. (Yes, I have seen the funny Facebook video where the Southern women go pick out their grandmother names like choosing a piece of jewelry.) My brother, who is seven years younger than I am, called me Mimi for a few months when he couldn’t say Tammy.

This was a beautiful, big baby

(8 pounds, 10 ounces). She had hair (hallelujah!), although not as much as her daddy did at birth.

I bonded with her immediately. I could hardly tear myself away. Everything she did was amazing and was the smartest, cutest way a baby had every reacted in the history of the world.

Yes, I was passing the grandmother test with flying colors. Bragging nonstop? Check. Lots of photos to show to anyone at a second’s notice? Check.

She is the joy of my and my husband’s life. She has beautiful blue eyes and curly hair, like her mother’s. And those kissable, chubby cheeks! She often has a serious countenance, like her daddy when he was a baby.

She loves puzzles, books, books and more books, music, her dog and cat (any dog or cat), her WubbaNubs (pacifiers with stuffed animals attached) and being outside. She loves playing in the water, and she likes to drink her bath water, no matter how much we try to stop it. When she drinks from a cup, she says, “Aaaah” afterward, just like Mimi. She loves to eat — anything from guacamole to Indian food. She did not inherit her refined palate from her daddy. She is in the 99 percentile for height. She did inherit that from her daddy.

She loves to rock, and she even seems to like her Mimi’s not-so-great singing of “Wheels on the Bus” and “Jesus Loves Me.” Her Pop’s silly dancing makes her laugh.

She can howl like an ASU Red Wolf and quack like a duck (one of her first words), among a litany of animal sounds. She says thank-you often, and she blows kisses and waves to every car or jogger who goes by the house. She likes to destroy the kitchen by taking every single item out of one particular kitchen drawer and cabinet, and we let her. Of course we do.

That’s what I realized. We enjoy just watching her. I do not worry about cleaning my house or getting a thing done when I’m with her. We do not have to worry whether to let her go to Austria, what age she can date, how much candy she can have or at what age to let her get her ears pierced. The weight of her raising is not on us. That’s a relief. We just have the fun.

We are the fun.

And that’s why being a grandmother is the best ever. Until I’m a great-grandmother.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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