Three Years Ago

A little over three years ago I was awaiting a momentous event. In a few days I will celebrate the third birthday of my first grandchild, my grandson.  I remember that I was in a class at church when I got the text that he had arrived.  It was so exciting.

I had longed for a grandchild for so long.  My son, my only child, was an older daddy.  He waited a while to find the right woman.  I worried that they wouldn't be able to have children.  I worried that I would be too old before they had children. I worried.  But, then he arrived.

My grandson and I have been buddies for these three years.  I was his babysitter, fulltime, five days a week.  I worried a lot about him.  He wasn't the same kind of baby as his daddy had been and he didn't follow the expectations in the baby books either. He was rather floppy, slow to sit and crawl and walk.  I worried.  I read what I could.  If there had been time and space in my life I would have gone to school for a master's degree in early childhood.

But this was the thing--although my grandson was slow at meeting the milestones, he was able to meet them.  Once he did, he was like every other kid his age. A year ago he was hardly talking and today he is using words that I don't know where he might have heard them. He puts two and two together and explains his world. He loves trains and classical music.

It has been decided that with the upcoming school year he will begin preschool.  This is such a big step. I don't know if he is ready.  I don't know if I am ready. Three years flew by too fast. Upon reflection I have to say that I have worried more about this grandson than I did about my own child.  I don't think that I had time to worry when I was a mom. But, despite all my worrying, and trying to solve the riddle who is my grandson, he is taking the big step of moving up to school into a broader world that his parents and I will not have control of as much.  He is growing up. I blinked and there he stands.