OK. I have one biological granddaughter who I love more than life itself. She's kind, good, beautiful and very smart. She went to a good college on a combination of athletic and academic scholarships and graduated cum laude with a degree in Biology (she was pre-med for three years but decided not to pursue a career in medicine). She is a teacher, having taught elementary, middle and high school, including in a school for autistic children. She teaches biology, chemistry and general science.
She's a fantastic wife and mother and a wonderful granddaughter to me. She's religious and lives her beliefs.
I also have two step-granddaughters (her step-sisters), who I have been grandma to since they were under five. I'm still Grandma. I'm proud of both of them. They have good careers and good lives.
I have two sort-of-step-granddaughters (the Spousal Equivalent's two granddaughters), who I have been involved with since birth. Because of some family dynamics I won't go into, I have never been allowed to be called anything that hints at "grandma", even though I've been extremely active in their lives, even babysitting one three days a week, ten hours a day for eight months for free. It's OK, they have their own name for me and they've always slipped up and called me Grandma on a frequent basis.
And then we come to the great-granddaughters.....who are my delights.
The older one is eight, in third grade, and is very, very smart (she's in the gifted program at school, doing some fifth grade work), a tender-hearted girl, sweet as all get out, eager to please, and a real drama queen (she really takes things to heart, wants to do good all the time, and gets her feeling hurt easily). Beautiful, of course. She's mixed-race, and is going to be rather exotic-looking when she grows into it. She's a bit of a scaredy-cat though and isn't very daring. Then the drama queen comes in. Her current ambition in life is to own a fleet of food trucks that go around serving mac-n-cheese to needy people on the street.
The five-year-old.......oh, boy......she's something else. Smart.....scary smart. She's in kindergarten and finished everything she was supposed to master by the end of October. She grasps concepts that a 5-year-old shouldn't be grasping. She's make an observation and we'll just look at each other and say, "Where the hell did THAT come from?" If she doesn't want to do something, though, Katy bar the door. This one is daring to the extreme. There's nothing too dangerous or scary for her to attempt. We call her "Sluggo"....she falls down and gets up and moves on to the next thing.
She looks like a model; people are always asking if we're getting her into modelling. Uh, no. She'd be good at it, though. She's tiny, closer to the size of a 3-year-old than a 5-year-old. That makes her even cuter. Think Shirley Temple mixed with Haile Berry, but cuter. And she's always "on stage", ready to put on an act. She's a sweetie when she wants to be and a bloody terror when it suits her. She wants to be an astronaut but only if she gets her own spaceship and can go to Alpha Centauri. Why Alpha Centauri, you might ask? Because it goes with her name.
I worry sometimes about the 8-year-old being too sensitive and being hurt by the world. I have no worries about the 5-year-old......rather, I worry about the world....LOL
OK, there's my bragging for the evening.
