Easter is a time when we tend to think of the emergence of the new.  For the religious Christians, there is Jesus’s resurrection, for me there is the coming of Spring blossom and warmer weather, and for children there are Easter eggs. 

This year, for Jane and I, there was the magic of a new life: a Second Grandchild (SG).  What a marvellous thing!

SG’s mother and father (Middle Son) are absolutely besotted with the new arrival and seem to be coping very well.  SG himself has seemed very chilled during the two visits that we have made so far to his Bristol home.  He seems so much smaller and longer legged in comparison to First Grandchild (FG) at the same age.  But maybe that is my faulty memory; all babies seem impossibly vulnerable, tiny and yet so full of potential.

SG’s arrival has been a great excuse to drag out old photo albums to look for similarities and differences between him and his father as a baby.  Certainly, like his Dad, he has a fine head of hair!

Our Easter weekend was also blessed with a visit from Eldest Son (ES), his wife and First Grandchild (FG).  It had been almost three months since we had last seen FG and I had been suffering something like withdrawal symptoms from not having seen him for such a relatively long time.  It was great to see his development since the New Year and now we have a whole new set of videos and pictures of him to look at on repeat.

During a spectacular sort out and tidy up of our top floor storage (following on from a huge effort to sort out her late Mum’s heirlooms and other stuff), Jane had dug out some of my, and our kids’, old and very battered Matchbox and Corgi model cars and a whole bag of old plastic animals. 

FG loved these old toys and it was great to see him using his imagination (and his new regard for Batman) as he played with them.  He was also demanding in his requests that we also participated in his play.  The refrain: “Grandad (or Granny), come and play” was frequent.  When I did get down and play, but also tried to have a conversation with someone else or do anything else at the same time, I heard him plead “Grandad, come and play, you keep stopping!”  Irresistible!

A highlight was an Easter Egg hunt around the garden following chalked arrows pointing to the route and egg hiding places.  FG struggled at first with the concept of arrows pointing to things but he loved finding the eggs with a bit of help and then collecting them in a little bag.  His parents were left with the awkward problem of how to manage the unprecedented volume of chocolate in his possession.

The anticlimax that always follows a visit from the Edinburgh branch of the family is offset this time.  First, it is only three weeks before we travel to Edinburgh to babysit for a few days while FG’s parents go to Spain for a wedding.  Second, we now have a Bristol baby just 45 minutes away to fawn over.  We are loving the prospect of seeing SG’s development, and the developing parenthood of MS and his fiancé, in a more ‘little and often’ way than is possible with FG.

It’s all so exciting and it’s enhancing the bounce I always get as Spring arrives. 

Various (so far) minor but irritating health issues have reminded me of my mortality in the last year or so.  This was underlined by the death of one of my friends from university just before Easter.  I once thought that as long as I lived to see my sons settled and had a grandchild, I would be happy to ‘pop my clogs’.  Now, of course, I want more.  I want to see more of my expanding family and see the grandchildren grow up.  We can’t have it all but, so far, so good.