PenPenWrites

parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more

© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

Category: grandchildren

  • Friends spent the first five months of the pandemic housing their daughter, her husband and three-year-old Lucas. The young family had been living in Manhattan when New York City became the hot zone for the coronavirus. They felt unsafe and moved in with her parents in suburban Maryland for what everyone assumed would be a…

  • A reader has been in touch about the "thank you" note issue, especially as it pertains to grandchildren and more especially to older grandchildren who may be gifted with a check on a birthday or during the Holidays. It is not surprising that the issue would rear its head again since, in these days of…

  • Their marriage had always been rocky, J tells me. "Constant arguments with moments of pure rage," all of which accelerated as their sons left for college but was in full bloom when they came home. The tension was such that J and G's kids moved out of the home as soon as they could–one taking…

  • Renoir: Mother and Her Children at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York We came out of college ambitions ablaze. This was the 1960s and 70s. We weren't going to be our mothers. Even though the culture and our parents told us otherwise, we went out and got interesting jobs–jobs our mother's couldn't even dream of.…

  • 'Tis the season to receive Thank You notes. The present-giving is behind us. If we weren't present at the gift-opening moments–and that's true for those of us who live far from our children or whose children are spending their holidays elsewhere–we may be waiting for the snail-mail delivery of a much-desired  handwritten Thank You note.…

  • When it comes to raising their children, our sons and daughters are not perfect. Or maybe they are but their spouses have too heavy or light a hand. Correcting behavior or disciplining their children is a touchy business and when we get to see it up close and personally, we may not like it. We…

  • Why say it again. Here's a re-run from a year or two ago about the sweetness and the challenges of a "one big happy family" Thanksgiving.                Thanksgiving is a family get-together favorite–for the most part. It's easy because there are no gifts, decorations or other "extras" to drive everyone to hyperventilate. It's fun…

  • We had plans to have dinner with friends last Friday night. They canceled. Their son asked them to babysit his 9-year-old twins. Paterfamilias watches the football game every Sunday with his friend Lance. This Saturday Lance called to say he couldn't make it: He and his wife were invited to have lunch with their daughter…

  • We are not vacationing with our grown children this year. Lots of people don't ever do it, but we did. We stayed in rustic condos in a resort in Vermont. We hiked mountain trails, we biked protected pathways and we splashed in mountain creeks. We taught our grandkids to skim rocks and to play tennis;…

  • A friend recently returned from Denmark where she spent 10 days with her daughter and granddaughter who've lived outside Copenhagen for nearly 17 years. It was a pleasant visit, she reports. She saw her granddaughter act in a play, and the three of them went to Amsterdam for a look at the tulips. She and…