Bragging Rights of a Baby Boomer Diva Grandma

When my daughter was younger, I used to love to show off her advanced learning skills. She was walking at eight months, speaking coherently at a year and a half and writing her first and last name at the age of three (and I have the picture to prove it).

Now I have a grandson and, just as I did with my daughter, I take great pride in showing off his advanced skills. At seven months, he started taking steps. As a matter of fact, he started trying to walk before he was crawling. Now, he’s trying to walk all over the place and is into EVERYTHING! No, he’s not speaking yet but I’m convinced he knows the five vowels and shortly he’ll be able to count to ten in Spanish thanks to the TV show Handy Mandy.

My “public” bragging moment came yesterday when I took my grandson with me to Harris Teeter. We were the checkout line when he apparently caught the attention of another little baby and her mom. June, I learned, was seven months old. She just seemed to be in awe of my little man. Maybe because he was dressed to kill in his Duke Blue Devils outfit complete with matching hat. Anyway, June’s mom brought her over to our line to interact with my grandson whose attention was elsewhere. Eventually, their eyes met and he let out a great big smile which revealed his two bottom teeth. He also waved at her and she tried to wave back. June’s mom could not get over the fact that my grandson knew how to wave correctly.

Now let me explain this. When you see babies wave, they tend to wave backwards. What I mean by that is the palm of their hand faces them instead of the other way around. Why? Because when parents are trying to teach them to wave “bye-bye”, their palm of their hand is facing the baby’s eye and that’s what they see. So what I did was turn my hand around so that the back of my hand faced him as I repeatedly said “bye-bye.” He processed what I was doing and got it right!

OK…this may seem like a small deal to you but if my grandson is going to be a future president, he might as well get that wave thing down early! Next week I'll be teaching him about the Law of Attraction.