Margo à la Maude: Grandparents

Grandparents

Yet another thing that I love about Canada: virtually everybody has different names for their different grandparents based on their ethnic background and traditions. Man, I've met a good many Opas and Omas in my day. Margo is no different, having Grandmaman et Grandpapa on my side, and Grandma and Grandpa on Donna's side (Grandpa could technically be a Grandpapa, but Margo already has one of those, so he'll have to let us know whether he's sticking with Grandpa or Pépère).

So the question that this entry will try to answer is, at Margo's tender, young age, who's better to have around at Christmas: Santa Claus or grandparents?

I mean, Santa Claus is a jolly old elf (of the gift-giving variety, not the Lord of the Rings killing variety) and spreads the spirit of Christmas around the world, except to Communists.

But grandparents are family, and have to make up for living in different time zones with constant attention and gifts. Honestly, when you stack up the two, grandparents are going to win over a fat guy committing break-and-enters around the world any day.

Though Margo got to meet her Grandma a few weeks after birth when she came to help us out in Ottawa, this was her first meeting of my parents and Donna's Dad.

As mentioned before, we landed in Winnipeg, rented a car, and drove to Saskatchewan. Grandmaman, my mother, met us at the airport with a borrowed car seat (which made our lives infinitely easier, thanks Mom, Paul & Melissa). Grandmaman got to be the first to see Christmas Margo, but the trade-off was that we could only stay for 3 hours before heading out and coming back a week later.

There's always a fear that these first meetings and first Christmases are going to be disasters, that your baby will play shy or wail and be grumpy because of the change of routine. Not so with Margo, who almost seems to be a born traveller, and Grandmaman had her laughing within minutes, way more often than we've ever been able to get her to laugh. We asked her how she did it, and she said "you just have to keep at it." This might explain how she got her kids to eat liver.

The trick with taking photos is to always make sure that you have the photos on your own camera. There were great shots of Grandmaman making Margo laugh, but they're all on her camera. We seemed to get all the shots of them just as Margo was crashing.

After Winnipeg came the farm for an overnight stay before heading to SK. And that means that Margo got to meet Grandpapa for slightly longer than Grandmaman, but just barely.

Grandpapa, in his bachelor ways, has his priorities straight: first, feed people, then socialize. After a great roast beef supper (ah, beef and the Prairies, I'm home) complete with flecks of parsley on the mashed potatoes (we stopped checking to see if the flecks were actually strands

of Copenhagen snuff tobacco after the first few times that he got it right), we were able to get a few Margo-Grandpapa shots with Dad.

Grandpapa is a tough man, deep voice and strong hands, so it's especially funny to watch him with soft cooing babies. And, let's be honest, there's a bit of a getting-to-know-you period on both their parts. Grandpapa, a voracious reader, would go from reading a book, completely focused, to leaning over and playfully booming to Margo "HI!" out of the blue. At first, this would make her shit herself. By the end of the week, she would smile and get into a side-to-side headshaking contest with her Grandpapa, gurgling all the way.

I also wanted to capture the difference in hands. Dad, a farmer and blacksmith for all of his life, has hands of thick leather. Margo, unemployed for all of her life, has considerably softer hands.

We left the farm on the morning of the 20th, heading northward between lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba (and Winnipegosis and about a bijillion other lakes) to The Pas to visit Margo's great-uncle and aunt, and my godparents (the real kind, not the mafia kind). The tricky part of travelling in the North on the shortest days of the year is that the sun doesn't arc that high in the sky up there, and doesn't stay above the horizon for as long as you would like. In densely populated areas, travelling at night is child's play, but with about 220 km of gravel road separating us and our destination, most of it rife with deer, moose, sasquatch and bison (we actually saw a "look out for bison" sign. Even if you don't know what a buffalo silhouette might look like, the sign does wonders at conveying the message "you will be sorry if you hit this animal" to drivers.) We spent the night at Armand and Kathy's, but unfortunately, our camera was in the car overnight, and fogged up right before taking a picture.

Now comes Grandma and Grandpa, who were anxious enough to see us that they tracked us down like bloodhounds by calling every place that we had been to and figuring out when we should be arriving. Cool your jets there, G&G, it's not like we decided to make a run for Tijuana to sell the rented car and start new lives as tattoo artists and guacamole thieves (for the record, if it ever comes to that, I call dibs on being the tattoo artist.)

Again, Margo didn't make shy in the least and was loving every bit of the attention. Even Charlie, their lap dog, got into checking out the baby, but was shooed away by Grandpa Marcel several times, to which he skulked away and plotted revenge.

I love watching everybody reduced to baby talk in Margo's presence, Grandma and Grandpa included. It was really cute to watch Grandma with the hugs and cuddling, and Grandpa watching every little move that Margo made. She was still working on her latest development of being able to flip from her back to her belly, but wasn't quite there. She would be almost there, but not quite able to manoeuvre past her shoulder, when Grandpa would help her out, flipping her thoroughly, almost 360 degrees.

Here we have Grandma holding the baby on Christmas Eve and Grandpa looking on as Donna massages Margo's legs, singing My legs are long and strong, my legs are long and strong, my mommy says I'm growing tall, my legs are long and strong to the tune of Farmer in the Dell, much to Grandpa's amusement.

Standing back, I know that they love Margo, but I could see it in them that they were especially happy that their daughter had become such a good mother.

Tears when we left, advice on which Chinese café (pronounced cuf-FAY on the Prairies) to avoid, we were on our way back to Manitoba for a week.

I'm really happy that all four grandparents were able to meet their newest family member, and that Margo saw them as family. It's what Christmas is about.

This brings to an end the entry on Grandparents, and now Mom can get off my back with "cousins?! what about the grandmamans and grandpapas?!" Eh, ti'Ma, m'a t'en faire you just have to keep at it.

Love you all.

- Michel

Actually, one quick side note. Why do guys instinctively playfully butt heads with babies? Literally, not figuratively. I've done it to Margo. I'm pretty sure that Tonton Peter did it. And here's evidence that the grandfathers did it. What's up with that?