Grandmothers Take Your Places

Although being a first-time grandmother is a sheer joy and an excitement almost better than finding out you were pregnant yourself, there is a time and place for everyone in this role.  The sooner you realize your place and what your roles are as a newbie grandmother, the more effective you can be without overstepping your boundaries.  Often times, grandmothers have the urge to step in and advise when advice wasn’t solicited in the first place.   At times, when you may feel the urge to give where not wanted and be where you’re not welcome, there are other things to do that will still allow you to be the grandmother you so badly want to be.  

Early in the pregnancy, grandmothers can be very helpful in giving generic advice which doesn’t leave the new mom and dad feeling as if they’re not capable.  Tips on diet, exercise and the amount of sleep necessary are usually pretty safe topics of discussion for a new grandmother.  The one thing about being a first-time grandmother is that the age difference between you and the new mom are probably not that far apart.  You can always plead ignorance about anything which seems full of power-punched advice by starting the conversation off with “You know, when I was pregnant the first time, I . . .”     

There are definite roles a grandmother is to be involved in and some physicians and midwives would agree that the birthing event is not one of them.  Grandmothers – stick to planning showers, shopping for Junior, figuring out how to make baby stop crying when mom and dad have exhausted all options, and leave the birthing up to the mom, the dad and the doc.  Spend as much time as you can searching for the First-Time Grandmother T-shirts, coffee mugs and license plates.  The occupation of Grandmother is a wide field and there are so many ways to express your desire to tell the world that you have grandbaby #1 on the way.  Surfing the web for this field of grandmotherhood will leave you with endless possibilities of marketing tools which will tell everyone you’re about to begin on-the-job training.