Dear LPG, 

Today I want to spend a little time empathising with all those grandmas and grandads, honorary or blood related, who are trying to spend some part of the current weeks filling in for infant’s schoolteachers over the summer break.

I am learning first hand that this is not an easy undertaking at times, and while your children will appeal for your invaluable enlistment to the service of babysitting those 5 and 6-year-olds while their teachers have a summer break and Mum and Dad continue to work, I feel this to be one of the most challenging parts of any grandparent’s role.

Anyone who has graduated to looking after the junior school aged ones, are likely to have found that they tend to be more focussed on what they want to achieve, although that comes with its own problems, and the babies are slightly easier to impress, although this is just my opinion.

The Easter holiday is only a couple of weeks long with the long weekend and the promise of a chocolate feast on the horizon, even if the religious reasons for the timing of the school break is not impressed upon them, and everyone gears up for Christmas whatever their faith, while the younger ones are no exception with the promise of presents and what has now become a week in the middle with Mum and Dad.

When they get to infant school age they are old enough to really anticipate what Santa will bring them even if they are lacking when it comes down to equating that knowledge with the nativity play they took part in a week earlier.

The summer holiday seems never-ending especially when it is as hot as it has been over the last couple of weeks and there are still a gruelling 4 or 5 weeks left. I say thank the lord because even if you have two of them to entertain this challenge will pass after three or so years.  But as I write this year we are not even two weeks in, while their energy levels make it impossible for me to keep up and the heat is making the task even more difficult this year. 

I resorted to looking for some ideas on the internet and there are a few alternatives to sitting them in front of the telly or lending them your smart phone to watch videos on, although a bit of that helps to pass the time too. 

Of course, it is good to see so much of them but keeping up gets harder every year… 

IW, Bell Green 

IW has found a few ideas that might help… 

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