What will you be like when you are a grandparent?

I hope that I will be much much older when I am a grandparent!! At least 12 or 16 years older. That's not too much. How can my grandparenting years be so close?? Woah! I have a lot to learn in 12 years. My kids have a long way to go in that short time.

I hope I'm a hands-on grandparent. I'd like to live close to my grandkids, but I know that life in the US has families moving around all the time. Who knows where we'll end up.

I want to be that grandparent who bakes cookies and teaches the kids crafts. I want to take my grandkids to the store and let them buy treats. I want to read to my grandkids, and rock them to sleep and let them sleep over. Maybe I'll get up early and make sausage gravy and biscuits for them. Maybe we'll write letters to each other---or e-mails.

The bad thing I'm realizing as I write this is that I'll probably not be retired before I have grandkids. But maybe I'll still be a teacher and have summers and holidays off similar to my grandkids. I will have to be a working grandparent---like my Mom is and my Dad was for a while. That does mean I won't be available as much as my grandparents were to me.

Jamie reminded me he's going to make his kids call me Moogi. That's Fernegi for Mom. (You know, Star Trek!) I don't know if we'll really go through with that. Since I have some Scottish ancestors, I could go with "Seanmhair." I don't even know how to say that. Or I do have one leg of the family that's French, so how about "Grand mere." Or we could do like I did with my parents---the first grandkid makes it up when they say whatever they say!