Relationships – My Day With Gabriel

I had a great day today as I got to take care of my grandson, Gabriel for about 6 hours today. I had agreed to do this for my daughter last week and I had thought my wife, Dale would be available to help also. I found out on Friday that Dale would be going to Orlando early this morning so I was on my own with Gabriel.  So I decided to try some ideas from my ecourse, How to Have Fun With Your Grandkids.

He will be 4 years old in early October so has a lot more energy than I do so I have to plan my activities very carefully. As usual, after about 10 minutes, all my planned activities were burned through so now I only had 5 hours and 50 minutes left to entertain him.

He is an only child and thus is used to being able to entertain himself for short periods of time. He is also in the last stages of being potty trained so you have to keep this in mind and remind him every 15 minutes or so that his bladder may be full. Luckily, that wasn't a problem today.

I have never seen a 3 year old who is so talented with a mouse when using a computer. Luckily, there are computer games at the Cartoonnetwork.com website that he is skilled at. We have long since left the Sesame Street games behind for some reason and are now into "beat them up" games. We got to play The Batman game on the Cartoonnetwork.com site for "way too long." We both have to play it as he can't move and do the karate moves at the same time so I get to move and he burns up all the energy before we get to the first "bad guy" but we muddle along.

We also got to try to find something that he will eat other than fudgecicles, push-ups and frozen gogurt. We finally settled on tomato soup, of which most of it went on his shirt as he tried to get the spoon to his mouth. Then we got to eat the fudgecicle and the push-up, which seemed to go much better for him.

Finally, I got to go pick up my daughter from her work and take them home and he did the famous,"fall asleep in about 3 blocks in the car" routine so it was quite quiet for the first time all day.

I can't tell you how great it is to spend time with him as he is someone special. My daughter is a single parent and the father of Gabriel also active is in his life. It has to be very difficult for both of them and I always wonder about him having 2 separate lives of which I know little about his other life and I'm sure they don't know much about his life with us.

It is also difficult as I always feel bad that I seemed to be making a living all the time when my daughter and son were growing up so my wife was the person they were closest to. I can always make myself feel guilty as I as always busy with something and didn't do a lot of things I should have done with my kids. I've been more available in the past two months as I have quit my job where I traveled every week from Sunday night through Thursday night. The funny part of this story is that my wife took a job where she is traveling all over the US every week so we just reversed our working roles. I think I should read something into this but it is a job that she enjoys so I'm not going to yet.

That was my day with Gabe, I hope I have many more with him.