Spending Time with a Toddler

As I am very bad at imagining what anything is ever going to be like - or possibly very pessimistic - I am often positively surprised. Never has this been truer than in my experience of becoming a grandmother. 

To be honest, I hadn't envisaged myself as a grandmother at all and so I had no clear expectation, just as before learning I was to become a mother I had no expectation of that experience either (although with some reason in that case as when I was 20 a doctor told me that I probably never would have a child - but that's another story). 

The only time the idea of being a grandmother had even occurred to me was when reading the ecstatic comments of one of my favourite writers, Helen Garner, on the subject. 

Mind you, much as I love being a grandmother, I still don't entirely understand a passage of hers where she describes how, when on a Melbourne tram with one of her grandchildren, someone takes her for her grandchild's mother and it seems absolutely vital to her that they know she is the child's grandmother - not because she feels guilty of misleading the other person but because being a grandmother is something she is so especially proud of. 

But I do now understand what she sometimes tries to explain - that the love you feel for a grandchild is quite unlike anything else, including the love you feel for your own children, enormous though that is.

It might be something to do with regaining a sense of how marvellous the world is or possibly a matter of discovering a new perspective on time.

For my grand daughter, most objects I barely notice or take for granted are interesting and even exciting. For her, almost everything is fresh and vivid. Because of this, she lingers, even in apparently dreary spots. Time stretches. A five-minute walk takes half an hour, as snails are studied, leaves collected, puddles jumped in, cats and dogs and birds and aeroplanes all greeted.

The other day while out walking together we came across some dandelions. Some were still flowering, others had gone to seed. When I spotted an unusually perfect dandelion seed head. I picked it:

I showed her how to blow on the seed head and count each time she did so, until all the seeds were scattered, as if each breath was the chime of a clock:

She blew until every seed had gone but, as she is small and her blowing is not expert, we had arrived at 29 o'clock by the time she'd finished:

Well no one ever claimed that dandelion clocks work with Swiss precision. In fact maybe they aren't about telling the time at all, but simply reminders that time passes very quickly. It feels as if my grand daughter was only born a month or two ago but in reality she is already almost two and a half years old.