Grandma Basics

I don’t care what handle you go by …  Grandma, Granny, Nana, Oma,  Baba, Nanny, Grammie (that’s me), or, as my one friend’s grandchildren call her, Guggy … I know that as a grandma you have the opportunity to play a vital role in a child’s life (yes, even if they call you Guggy).

I feel that grandmotherhood is evolving.

Now that I have become a grandma, my own Grandma Chubala seemed like a different breed of grandmother 50 years a go.  She was a rotund, dark-haired woman whose grandparents had come to Canada from the Ukraine. She married my grandfather, an Polish immigrant, when she was 16 years old and he was 32. She worked hard on the farm, raising seven children in a house with a hand pump in the kitchen and an outhouse in back. My parents and brother and sister and I would go to visit her in the summers once school let out, making the long drive to her farm in Lampman, Saskatchewan in our orange station wagon. I spent my days there  climbing on the hay bales, sitting on cows as they were milked, eating strawberries from the garden, and catching frogs.