Grandparent Mode

We don't feel old enough to be grandparents. I think we hearken back to our memories of our grandparents and think of them as older, slower and in a different phase of life than we are. All of those things may be true, but our grandparents lived active, busy lives.

Classic storybook visions of grandparents look something like this: grandpa sitting by the fireplace in his recliner smoking a pipe and grandma with her gray hair in a bun baking cookies in the kitchen. A fairly stereotypical description and in reality, nowhere near what most grandparents look like.

In the past few days, I've had to chuckle at a few things that may or may not be related to this stage of life we're entering. First, I'm surrendering to the fact that I need "readers," especially in low light. As we were driving home from finding out "the baby" is a granddaughter, I had to put on my old lady readers to read something on my phone. Oh, my aging eyes. At least my readers are a little sassy (and that includes some of you).

Last night we did another quintessential "old person" thing: we went to dinner at 4:30 p.m. Who eats at that hour aside from shift workers and older people? In our defense, because I feel like I need to provide rationale for this out of character Early Bird Special-like endeavor, it was the only reservation open before 8:30 and we try not to eat at the Hour of Europeans. Why not go elsewhere, you ask? Well, because we had a coupon that expired yesterday. We couldn't just let $20 slip through our fingers, could we? Grandparents are more responsible than that.

Although I still feel like I'm 27, I guess I have to accept the fact that I am, in fact, old enough to be a grandma with readers who occasionally eats at unusually early hours if she has an expiring coupon. And I'm totally looking forward to baking cookies with my granddaughter, but I'll forego the gray hair in a bun as long as I can.