Grandmotherhood

I was quite convinced that I was NOT ready for the state of grandmotherhood (is that a word?  if it isn't, it ought to be!) when I got the announcement that, ready or not, that state was coming.  However, as the song goes, Love is a many splendored thing, and ready or not, fall in love I did.  I confess to being dismayed when I found out that my grandbaby was going to be a boy.  A boy!  I don't know how to do boys!  I've always been convinced that God knew this and that is why He blessed me with two wonderful, beautiful girls.  Really, God?  A boy??

Thankfully I had nearly as much time as his mother to prepare for his birth, and by the time he was born, I was ready to be his grandmother, and even the grandmother of a boy.  What a blessing!  Who knew?  (Of course, all the mothers of boys are shouting, "I did!  I did!") 

From the moment of his birth (which I was tremendously blessed to witness - no greater thrill than seeing your baby have her own baby!), I have been in love.  Connor (or Connor Boy/CB as I lovingly refer to him as), is the delight of my eyes. He turned two last month and I have been blessed to have the opportunity to be his nanny since he was a wee one. 

                                                    Connor, when he was much younger.


He is the most observant little fellow.  Since his eyes first layed sight on the world outside the womb he has been gazing around taking it all in.  He blows us away with the observations he makes.  One example - for months now (perhaps last Spring?) we've realized that he knows the emblems on all the cars of his loved ones.  It doesn't have to be their car - just the emblem.  Another - we had lunch with Auntie M at Costco one day.  Anybody who's ever been to Costco during lunch time knows that it is near chaos.  Auntie M had a bottle of water.  The next day he was at the grocery store with his mother and saw the brand of water that Costco sells and said "Meh, Meh."  (Meh is M.)

He has a book that has crows in it and I taught him what they say.  A time or two we've been outside and the crows would be cawing away and I had him listen to it.  Today we walked out of his mother's office where I'd picked him up and he heard a crow.  "Daw, Daw!" he said.  "Dow!"  (He hasn't mastered the "k" sound, yet!)  Then a few minutes later when we pulled up to Target he saw a crow and again, "Daw, Daw!".  I just love watching him learn and grow. 

When I realized that I was going to be a grandmother I knew that the name "Grandma" wasn't for me.  After some thinking I came up with Dodo.  To some that might sound odd, but when I was a teenager my lovely 2-3 year old niece called me that, as Lorrie is a very hard name to say.  Shortly after that I discovered that there are a couple of men in the bible named Dodo and that the name means "loving".  An aunt/grandmother can't go wrong with that! 

While my daughter was pregnant she and her husband decided that they wanted to know the sex of the baby but that they would keep his name a secret.  When she was younger, maybe preteen, as a joke she used to tell me that when she had a baby she was going to name it "Frankly", because it was a term I used (and still use) with a fair amount of frequency.  So, since we didn't know the name of the baby, we called him Frankly.  In the mean time my youngest daughter and I took delight in trying to "guess" the name of the baby by going through the alphabet and guessing names that started with each letter.  Of course, we didn't actually guess feasible names.  Bartholemew and Ichabod are examples of the ways we'd torture CB's mother.  Such fun! 

All this to say - I love being Connor's Dodo and Connor loves being my Connor Boy.  While there are blessings that God waits for us to ask for, some He gives to us whether or not we think we want them.  Praise be to God.