A childs’ love for their Grandmother

A close family unit is something very important to me. Knowing that my son is as happy with my mum as he is with me, gives me great comfort and makes things like working abroad or going away for a weekend, much easier to do. Knowing that she is on hand is something that we never take for granted.

B spends at least two days a week with his grandmother or nonna as we call her (from the Italian roots), and will see her at least 4 days a week. We live close by and came to an agreement early on that she would help us with the childcare, so they are understandably close.

However, of late B seems to have taken his love for his nonna to another level. He no longer loves her, he LOVES her. She has knocked me, his own mother, from the top spot!!! Now we can joke, but in all honesty, it’s starting to get a little personal and I’m getting a bit jealous!

B has been unwell the last couple of days. High temperature, fever, cold etc, and there is frankly nowhere he would rather be than under the watchful eye of his ~~mother~~ nonna. I went dashing upstairs at 10pm last night to calls from B of ‘Mumma’ to get to his side to have him say in a poorly sleepy voice, ‘Not you Mumma, I said Nonna! Can you get Nonna please?’.

He asks for ‘My Nonna’, I assume just to ensure that I know that she is his at anytime throughout the day; his morning wee, on the way to school, bath time, story time. You get the drift.

As I was literally dragging him kicking and screaming from nonna’s house the other day, he even told me that he wanted to ‘live with nonna, and not go home with mumma’.

Bloody cheek!

I found myself saying, ‘Well fine, if you don’t love me anymore then you had better go and live with her’.

Nothing like an unreasonable argument with an upset 2.5yr old eh. Nonna plays the typical role of a Nan/Grandmother, and by that I mean she lets him do pretty much whatever he wants; showers him with gifts and definitely doesn’t discipline him to the level that we do. It’s a winning formula really.