Reluctant Grandma Reluctant Grandma’s Blog

The last few pictures that she’s posted on Facebook show my grandson playing outside, riding his bike, and smiling on the couch. But I can’t help noticing that he is not wearing his glasses in any of them. So I called her up and said where are his glasses? and she just brightly announced, “Oh, he broke them!”

Now, the first photo of him with his glasses was taken right before Christmas. So that means he has gone without his glasses for 2 months.There is no excuse for this – the eye doctor visit and his glasses are free because he is covered under Tenncare for children. So she has deliberately withheld medical care for 2 months. How is that child even functioning in school for 2 months if he cannot see?

We have dogs and treat them like part of the family. They stay indoors unless put on a leash and walked in our own yard. Once in a great while we take a couple of them to a park for a change of scenery. But the dogs are not allowed outside without their harness and leash.

The grandson has a hard time realizing that if the door is not closed completely that the dogs can escape. That is a lot of drama, as the dogs run hysterically down the street and risk getting run over by heavy traffic or in a fight with other neighborhood dogs.

We are working on that.

We had one tooth come out over the summer and then. . . . nothing. I was thinking it is getting awfully late to be losing teeth now – he is six and only one tooth out.

Well, yesterday he was playing a video game and his hand went up to his mouth and he realized that another tooth was loose. So he showed me and I thought, well that will be an issue for a couple days while it works itself loose and falls out. But an hour later, he put the video game on pause and spit into his hand. There was the tooth! Loose for an hour! That must be a world record!

We put it into a little baggie so he wouldn’t loose it on the way home. I’m told that he put it under his pillow and the Tooth Fairy didn’t forget this time to put a dollar under his pillow in payment for the second tooth.

This morning I was half asleep and trying to decide if I wanted to wake up or go back to sleep for an hour, when I heard a strange noise in the living room. Something had dropped and clattered to the floor. So I started to wake up and figure out what caused the noise when I heard another sound similar to the first. All the dogs were accounted for in the bedroom, but they had heard it, too, and were sitting up, alert. Another strange sound, more like a thump or a clump, and I realized there must be a little boy going through his toy box in the living room. We weren’t expecting any little boys today, but for some unknown reason there he was, in the living room, in pajamas, trying to play quietly and not disturb us from our sleep. Once he saw us, stumbling aorund in search of a bathrobe and slippers, there was a huge grin and a hug, and off we went to the kitchen to fix some breakfast.

Two small pictures of our grandson in the first grade showed up last night. They aren’t very good of him, but I don’t think you get to choose a pose – you take what you can get. I wish she would take him to KMart’s photo department and let them do a variety of professional poses. He is a cute kid with quite a spark in his eyes, but you don’t see that in this forced smile school photo.

We were asked to hand deliver her paycheck since she can’t get to the warehouse to pick it up. She needs the money and it wasn’t out of the way, so we drove by her apartment to leave it with her. I’m surprised she didn’t ask for a ride to the bank. We could see through the open door that the worthless POS boyfriend was sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Guess without her car he can’t get back and forth to work, either. You would think that having worked there for about a year he wold have made friends with one or two of the guys so he could call and ask for a ride for a few days and he could offer to kick in a few bucks for their gas. But no – I can see that he feels entitled to sit at home all day since she is.

Bad time of year to not be working. Who is going to pay the rent due next week? Is our grandson going to have a new costume to go out trick or treating? He’s in the first grade and this is the best time of their lives for holidays like Halloween and Christmas.

Every car that we’ve let her have or drive she has trashed or wrecked. We finally took the Taurus back when she had her ass attack back in May. If she’s going to be an ass then she doesn’t get the free use of the car. So she went without for a few months and somehow talked a used car lot dealer into letting her buy a used Jeep Cherokee off the “buy here – pay here” lot. It was easy to figure out which one was hers. The one at the depot parking lot with the temporary tags that expired 6 weeks ago.

So this morning I get a wake up call from hubby that he’s at the emergency room with her. She wrecked the Jeep and had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. While reading some papers she drifted off the road and hit a brick mailbox. The car had to be towed off. The police found out that she didn’t have insurance and the tags are dead. I wish they would have taken her jail, but they sent her to the hospital for x-rays. Who is going to pay for all that?

She’s not hurt worse than whiplash. The car is totaled. Now neither she nor the boyfriend has a way to get to work. Lovely.

And now the grandson rides the bus to school and back.

She was going to get a one bedroom apartment because it was cheaper and she didn’t care if he had to sleep on the couch. After all, he’s little and he usually falls asleep on the couch every night watching TV anyways.

I told her that was not a good idea – that he needs his own room so he can have someplace to go and have some privacy. Even little kids deserve some privacy, and so does she for when she wants to have some adult time without him sitting on the couch. So she did at least get a two bedroom apartment and he does have his own little bed in there, with the toy chest that we bought for him and the little kid table and chairs that we bought for him and the nightstand that we bought for him.