While we were at the beach for Thanksgiving I saw lots of grandmas frolicking with their grandchildren. Frolicking. I like that word. Yes, there were grandmas frolicking on the beach with their grandchildren. I like the imagery that conjures up. But wait a minute. Maybe they weren't grandmas. Maybe they were (tadadaDAHHHH! and cue echo sound effects here) older mommies on the beach running around with their children.

Nah. Couldn't have been. Not the sweet little old white haired ladies that I saw picking up shells, building sand castles, and tossing starfish. They were definitely grandmas.

I particularly enjoyed watching one family of five that was having a ball. The patriarch of the group was resting comfortably and supervising from his beach chair(hey! hey! look up there did you see that? lookit! see the birds?) while the attractive grandmother(?) in a killer one piece swimsuit was on a dead run with three little ones the entire afternoon. I liked her old-school style of handling her brood. Loving, nurturing, and fun; but no-nonsense and demanding all at the same time. She even sent the littlest one to time out for a quick minute to pull himself together after a meltdown about something or another. He obeyed promptly. Heck, I would have obeyed promptly if she had given me the look of warning she shot in his direction.

At one point we ended up standing right next to one another while our kids were jumping waves and splashing all around. I decided to test some waters of my own. I mentioned how cute her children were. She let out a raucous hoot and was tickled to death that I thought the three busybodies were her children. The grandmother explained to me that she and her husband had simply taken the cutie pies off of her daughter's and son-in-law's hands for the afternoon to give them a much needed break. "Honey, they'll be all theirs in just a few more hours," she told me.

I made some comment about never being able to tell these days if someone was the parent or the grandparent with people waiting longer and longer to have children or adopt them. (Yuk-yuk)

"I guess," she said. I wasn't surprised when she followed that up by saying that she didn't understand why in the world anyone would want to do that. Then I ended up with way more than I bargained for from my simple little comment. I got the full story of how she met her husband when she was "just a girl" and married and started her family and raised four children and on and on and on and how you couldn't pay her to do that again at her age. I just said uh-huh. Never letting on that I was pretty much "doing that" or would be doing it at her age.

I read another post on another blog about the BTDT (Been There Done That) syndrome regarding older parenting. A lot of older parents who have already raised their children to adulthood can't imagine doing it all over again, but that's because they've already done it once, twice, three times or more over. That made a lot of sense to me when I read it. I compared it to graduate school. You couldn't pay me to do that again at my age, but there are plenty of folks who are my age that are embarking upon graduate degrees. And maybe that's part of what the grandmother on the beach was expressing. She'd been there and done that and now the grandma role was just fine by her.