The imaginary grandchild

My daughter is desperate for her biggest brother to get married and have a child.

Both he and his girlfriend are 25 and they’ve been together for five years. They’ve been living together for over two years and bought a house together more than a year ago. They’ve also said they would like to have children before they’re 30.

But I suspect my daughter is still going to have quite a wait until she becomes an auntie. But it doesn’t stop us imagining what we would do with the future grandchild. Not all of it exactly serious…

I’m not one of those Disney adults you see all over social media. but I do really love Disneyland Paris and would love to go back. Having a grandchild would be the perfect opportunity for me.

My husband and daughter love theme parks, so they imagined taking the mythical grandchild/ niece/ nephew to Alton Towers. My husband would take him/ her to football too.

Where else would I take them? What is my thing? I guess I’d take them to see Yungblud and Levellers.

We wondered what our grandparent names would be. I’m a definite Grandma (even though my mum is also Grandma and it could get confusing). I’ve never liked the name Nan/ Nana/ Nanny, although I know lots prefer it.

My dad is Grandpa, which I think is lovely. My husband sees himself as more of a Grandad. Or maybe Gramps or Grampy. Our friend is Grumpy, despite being the least grumpy person we know.

My younger son suggested we get in first on the ‘posh grandparent’ names (because you don’t want to have the same names as the other set of grandparents). He suggested ‘Gan Gan’ and ‘Pim Pom’. That is definitely not happening!

He imagined them saying ‘Oh no, Pim Pom, we’re not going to junior parkrun again!’

He also imagined them going home to Mummy and Daddy to say that Gan Gan had taken them for their first tattoo to celebrate reaching 10 parkruns.

(I don’t have any tattoos, but a joke I made a couple of years ago grew legs and now it is almost certain that I will be getting a 500 tattoo next year when I reach 500 parkruns.)

It will probably be a few more years until the imaginary grandchild materialises, but they can look forward to a busy time of theme parks, live music and parkrun. They should make the most of it, because it might get hard to juggle when we have six or more of them!