For all of my readers that have kids… have you ever stopped and thought about how different your parents treat your kids’ verses how they treated you growing up? I’m mainly talking about presents… and if you’re tempted to reflect on this difference, I would advise against it.
This whole Grandparent spoiling thing is very new to me. Simply put, my Grandparents weren’t in the position to spoil. I am one, of about, twenty-eight grandchildren on my mother’s sides and one, of about, twenty-three grandchildren on my father’s side… my Grandparents would have needed to be multi-millionaires to spoil their grandbabies… and they certainly weren’t millionaires. Now, to their credit, both sets of Grandparents were really good about treating their grandbabies equal… so none of us were spoiled… at least to the best of my knowledge. I really have no idea. My grandparents were from Baltimore and I grew up in Atlanta. Shady things could have happened.
Anyway, this year for Christmas my parents decided to get Grayson a new bike. It had been on our list of things to get him and my parents volunteered. Awesome! Santa can now focus on getting Grayson the Millennium Falcon instead! (Shhh… don’t tell anyone).
But then… then I started thinking about the time my parents bought me a new bicycle. I’m pretty sure I was in the fifth grade… or there abouts.
Growing up I had inherited my dad’s childhood bicycle. It was yellow… made of steel… and it had cement tired. I remember riding that bike most of my childhood. At some point, my brother got his first 10 speed. I don’t remember if he bought it himself or if my parents bought it… but all I remember is inheriting my brothers old dirt bike. Now, I should point out… my brother is six years older than me and when I inherited his bike… it was too big for me and really beat up… and the yellow cement monster was too small for me... and really beat up. But, I had no other options.
Finally, somehow, I wore down my parents and they agreed to buy me a new bike… which turned into such a long and odd ordeal that, if I had known, I would have kept the yellow beast.
Over the course of the next week, my father took me to every bike shop in the Atlanta Metro area. The quest was less about finding the bike I wanted and more about finding out what my options were within the price range my father was willing to spend. I can’t blame him really… but he tried to hide his frugality by claiming the process was a ‘learning experience’ for me. This was the first of many epically long ’learning experiences’ my father drug me on.
Now, my father is a very smart and shrewd business man… but when the ‘right’ bike turns out to the $80.00 6-Speed we saw in the ‘Toys R Us’ Sunday circular before setting foot in a single store… the only lesson I’m ‘learning’ is how valuable my time is.
And I still think it was odd for my father to take me to ‘Toys R Us’ to buy the bike, talk a stock boy into putting the bike together, and then leave me with the guy in the ‘Toys R Us’ warehouse to ‘learn how to build a bicycle’ while he left to run other errands.
So, yeah… they ordered Grayson’s bike sight unseen off Amazon. Then again… we all know it’s the Grandma’s that spoil our kids. ;)
BTW: To all of my Baha’i friends, I wish you a very peaceful ‘Day of the Convenant’!
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