When Grandma is the aspie

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As ya'll know, I'm the aspie in my family (although I suspect it in my 18yo son) and I interacted with my kids a little different than other parents interacted with theirs. I didn't do the pretend and talking down to them thing and wasn't that good at playing with them. They were used to that and everything was fine.

Well, I kept my 3yo grandbaby the other night for the first time ever. She did great, no problems at bed time or anything like that, which I was very surprised about because I'm not used to kids that mind that well. The funny part came when she was playing with her toy castle here and she said she wanted to tell me a story about it. So, she did. Then she asked me to tell her a story about it, so I told her all about life in a medieval castle, feudal lords, primogeniture and the plague and it's effects on the labor force at the time. She listened and seemed to just sort of incorporate it halfway into her play but when my son came to pick her up we were sitting there talking and he was watching her play and she was bringing up all sorts of stuff like I had told her about. He said "Ooooh I forgot you did that kind of thing. She wanted you to tell her a story didn't she?" I said yep and he said "And you told her a bunch of facts about something related to what she was interested in and now they are stuck in her head." I said yep. He said "Did you mention the plagues?" I said of course. He said I remember playing "plague" as a kid. He said "You didn't even tell her in story form did you? It was all about some 'did you know ....' type stuff wasn't it?" I said yep. He said "Good to see things ain't changed" and smiled.

I just thought I'd share that. I thought it was a cute story.

You're the best storyteller ever, OliveOilMom

I really enjoyed your story as well. It was very interesting. Don't tell her about Vlad the Impaler. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler

That is great!

Oh, I'm sure I will around Halloween. And Countess Bathory as well. When my son wanted to go as Frankenstein one year I ended up in a long talk with him about Mary Shelly, Lord Byron, and the times they lived in and experiments and such. I figure that I either completely ruin things for them or I make them better. I'm leaning toward making them better because my kids always enjoyed my little fun facts. Then again, they didn't know any different.

I never talked down to my kids at all. Ever. I always talked to them like adults. Of course I did the cuddle up and talk sweet to them but never did I try to simplify things so they could understand. No "dumbing down" or "glossing over". Just the hard facts with me. Except for Santa and the Easter Bunny and such. But while I did expect them to understand things like adults and talk to them as such, I did explain the things to them so they could understand them.

I think so too. It would have made my childhood more interesting if people said things like that.

Just wait till he asks you where babies come from!

Very cool.

Good to know that the Spirit of Saint Alan lives on, that somewhere in the world is someone who is just herself, not paralyzed with obsession about what she should be or what a "normal" grandma would be, that somewhere in the world someone didn't poop kittens about it all.

There is still some sanity somewhere. And that is very cool.

I had to read the original book "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelly. The Hollywood movies are way off from the book.

In the book these are the facts.

a. Frankenstein was the name of the man who created the monster.
b. The monster had no name.
c. Mary Shelly does not give us the details on how the monster was created.
d. Frankenstein was not filled with joy at his creation. He was filled with horror and disgust and guilt.

I bet Saint Alan and I would have excellent intellectual discussions.

I hope you didn't leave out the part about how Edward Trelawny snatched Shelley's heart from the funeral pyre at the cremation and kept it after Shelley drowned. (Percy Shelley, the poet, not Mary Shelley, who still had her heart at the time)

Next time you can watch Monty Python & the Holy Grail together and she can learn to play "Bring Out Yer Dead," "I Told Him We Already Got One," "The Ritual of the Holy Hand Grenade," "Duel with the Black Knight" and other classic historical reenactments.

While we're on the subject of Monty Python, don't forget to do a screening of "The Meaning of Life."

Nothing cuter than a 3-year-old singing "Every Sperm Is Sacred."

Thank you for sharing that. Please share more! It's good for this AS mom to hear.

I've never simplified my responses for my children, either. I've never been very into literature or history, but my kids have heard a lot of scientific explanations in their short lives.

We never say the sun "sets" or "comes up". We say how in the morning the earth will have rotated so that our place on it will face the sun again.

My (then) 2-year-old (NT) corrected her toddler teacher in saying that her baby wasn't in her "tummy", it's in her uterus and it will come out of her vagina.

Talk about the movement of particles that make up different objects has been a recurrent discussion since my kids were toddlers.

Loved reading this! My mom is also very close to the Aspie line. I never understood why my friends thought she was strange.

Know what? She is terrific with my Aspie son! She really gets him in a way few others, myself included sometimes, do. Three cheers for Aspie grandmas!

I never thought the sun going up or down was making it simple or dumbing it down. To this day I still talk that way because that is what I learned. We say the sun goes up because it does look that way and it also looks like it goes down. Of course I know the real reason now why the sun comes up and the sun goes down. I learned that in second grade but I still said the sun goes up and goes down.