PenPenWrites
parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more
recent posts
- Sharing Family History: What one generation owes another.
- Gifting and Getting: A wish list for gifts from grandkids
- Blast from the Past: Our youthful slang is no longer passé.
- Money Matters: Data on how the Bank of Mom and Dad is doing?
- After the Minneapolis Killings: Nora Ephron on parenting grown children
© 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.
recent posts
- Sharing Family History: What one generation owes another.
- Gifting and Getting: A wish list for gifts from grandkids
- Blast from the Past: Our youthful slang is no longer passé.
- Money Matters: Data on how the Bank of Mom and Dad is doing?
- After the Minneapolis Killings: Nora Ephron on parenting grown children
© 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: guest privileges
-
Reader alert: This could get ugly.The view from the trenches of our grown children is not always a pretty one. There's a blog out there called findababysitter.org that suggests that some of us should not be called on to babysit. I agree. Not all of us enjoy it–especially if it lasts more than an hour…
-
Last February, I went to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and her family who were living there for a year. Berlin was cold, gray and dreary, but the visit was a dazzlingly bright time. There was a special warmth in spending a week with my daughter and her family and feeling their "thank you" for…
-
She's become a veteran at this: hosting her grown children and their families at the villa she rents in Tuscany. We won't go into how some people are really lucky about their vacation deals–she teaches Italian and needs to keep her skills fresh; he's a successful businessman [retired] and can afford to indulge this form…
-
The day after Thanksgiving is a peaceful one. There's no more cooking to be done–it's a leftovers feast. Everyone's following favorite pursuits. At Thanksgiving Central for our family, the three granddaughters were doing something girly-girly together; Alpha daughter and my daughter-in-law were chatting. Outside, Uber son, my grandson, son-in-law and Paterfamilias were tossing the football…
-
We arrived for Thanksgiving at Uber Son's house on the Tuesday before the great feast. The idea was to help our daughter-in-law out–make it easier on her by either doing the shopping or watching the Grands or some combination of both. On Wednesday, while the older Grands went off to school, Uber son went to…
-
When Lola's daughter had Lola's first set of grandchildren, Lola was just a tiny bit jealous of the other set of grandparents. They had sold their condo in Florida and moved to Nashville to be close to their only son and his children. They were there to do the burping and diaper changing; they were…
-
One of my "notes to self" [see list to the left] is about housekeeping–a euphemism for putting our imprint on our grown child's home or for acting on "advice" by assuming it's wanted and warranted. This goes for dads as well as moms: No fixing things, no rearranging messy closets; no relining kitchen shelves–unless asked.…
-
"Remember those news clips of the Beatles landing in the US in '64–the crowds going crazy, jumping up and down?" This is the question Alpha Daughter poses to Paterfamilias. It is also her report on the reception I received when I arrived in Berlin a few weeks ago to visit her and her family. My…
PenPenWrites 