All grandmas great and small
Today was my grandmother's 90th birthday, so Harvey my mom and me headed into Brookline to meet my brother and Grandma for a birthday lunch.
I have never been so exhausted by a 90th birthday party.
My mother is like crack cocaine to babies. She is engaging ramped up to eleven: every moment offering a new game or a fresh toy or a snack of one kind or another. If she's in a room with multiple adults Harvey will scream bloody murder if he's being held by anyone but her. Wonderful for him I guess, but how long can a one year old stay on a coke binge? When he's with her for an afternoon he comes home completely wasted. He sleeps for two hours straight and then moans for the rest of the evening. Either his brain can't take the overstimulation, or he goes into withdrawl. Either way, it's a difficult situation for his parents, and for grandma-parental relations. Like, "Yeah mom, Harvey LOVES you. Listen, do you think you can watch him for LESS time next week?
When I went back to work after Harvey was born, many people comforted me with sentiments like, "At least your close to family and you have so many people around who love him." And I'm thinking, "yeah, I hope he can survive it."
Tomorrow we're planning a whole day out in celebration of our upcoming anniversary. We've organized several switch-offs between Harvey's two grandmothers so that my mom can play the shit out of him in the middle of the afternoon and Dan's mom can make sure he actually naps. Either way he'll be a wrecktastic disaster by the time we get him home tomorrow evening, but I'm reasonably sure he'll be alive and breathing. And when he recovers a few days later we'll forget about the screaming and remember the time we spent going down all those water-slides.
Yes, we're headed to Water Country. It's not your 5th anniversary every day, after all! Have some fun!