At our age, there needs to be a good reason to run – like the house is on fire or someone is firing a gun

My two grandsons, 3 and 5 years old, were coming to stay. It would only be for two days but we had steadied ourselves, my mum and I. Looked at each other with a football manager’s eye. What shape are you in? Is that hip weak? Can those ankles take it? Have you taken all your medication? Checking up on the team before the invasion. With my mum in her mid-80s and me in my 60s, we are pretty old for this game.

They arrive with a flurry of hugs, boundless energy and laughter. All too soon we are left alone with two little guys who want to explore every quarter, all rooms, every cupboard, the garage the garden and all shelves that they can possibly reach.  Privacy goes out the window as they bang on the toilet door demanding to know "what are you doing in there?" We walk them to the park and local playground. It was frightening for us. My eldest grandson has a cast on his arm from fracturing his elbow and the playground seemed right for compounding the injury. Kids are not like adults in so many ways. They, in a cast, will happily scamper up a climbing wall or the tallest helter-skelter slide. My mum and I ran like demented bodyguards after the two of them. Danger seemed incredibly close and we walked home relieved everyone had survived. Even the eldest with his cast had insisted on trying the zip line and managed remarkably well. Don't ask why unearth we let him do it. We have no idea!!

By the time we got home to a welcome cup of tea and a quiet sit the two boys had already eaten, instantly recharged and were as full of energy as before. Now mum and I began to worry. It was barely 10.30am and we were ready to be substituted. Fortunately, my middle son their uncle had boundless energy like the boys. While mum and I sneaked off for a badly needed midday nap he ran them around the house playing wrestling games.  We awoke refreshed but aware the rest of the day lay ahead. 

A box of old toys from the garage was salvaged and the boys fell on them like wolves. We built Lego together, played an ancient basketball game that their father had played more than 30 years ago (the exact same toy, conserved in mum’s garage over the decades).  The boys were constantly good-humoured. Normally they were instructed by their parents, when they had eaten enough, to stop. We, grandmother and great-grandmother, adopted an alternative approach. We force-fed the two of them rather like they stuff ducks. Until they’d hold up their hands and say no more. We would ignore that and keep filling their tanks. They were obviously nonplussed by this novel handling. The eldest examining us strangely as if we didn't know the rules at all. The first day we fed them until they had indigestion. The second day the boys were more cautious, having learned that we would feed them dangerously full. Their appetites seemed smaller and both mum and I fretted. What if our small charges starved under our careless care?   Meanwhile, our own intakes had increased substantially. I was downing chocolate and crisps in minutes of stolen time. My mum had taken to eating three Choc ices (white chocolate of course) a day. Regularly smuggling them behind her back to the living room so the boys would not see them. In our second day, all the rules went out the window. Survival was the goal and we thrived on their hugs like an energy source. 

They were challenges. Like mum finding a small brown leaf on the bathroom floor, it turned out not to be vegetation at all, least said! Or discovering that some small fingers had turned on the electric blanket on the bed in the spare room. Buttons are an attraction for the under fives. So we needed to check freezer plugs, electric fireplaces and phones constantly. Small children are a bit like controlling a flood. When you manage to block them touching the cooker switches immediately they head for the TV or sound system or computer. The running around the house both inside and outside seem frenetic but was good humoured. At our age, there needs to be a good reason to run – like the house is on fire or someone is firing a gun in your direction. At their age running seemed the default setting as did the shouting and laughter. 

At night they usually have a bath in their own home and when I told the three-year-old we had no bath he didn't believe me. He pushed into the bathroom hunting for one. Finding none he reluctantly agreed to sit on a small stool in the shower while I showered him.  I was telling him that his great grandmother believes most people have dirty bottoms and claims that the shower-head should be directed at this extremity from below not above. Our three-year-old took this piece of advice very seriously and sprayed his own bottom and me (by accident) with equal gusto. When both were washed and in clean pyjamas in bed my mum and I gave each other high-fives. We had survived this invasion of love.  Grandmother and great grandmother’s tanks were topped up with love.  They may be small containers but little people pack a big punch in the love stakes.

These old bones and tendons do not bend and stretch

I’m in Gatwick about to fly home to Malta after three weeks of being a granny to active grandsons in the UK. They filled every morning with hugs and smiles at my bedside. They ran with an abundance of energy that no 60-year-old could match.

At first, my plan was to exhaust all their energy by huge walks along the coast near Folkestone. Very quickly, I learned that however far we covered the boys once fed were good to go again almost immediately. Huge adventure playgrounds, I discovered, are heart-attack places for grannies. Your child, a toddler disappears into a labyrinth high above you jostled by millions of older children. 

You cannot follow. These old bones and tendons do not bend and stretch. The elder one returns in one piece but the smaller is crying in pain somewhere in this madhouse of children, parents, psychos with ladders and drops everywhere. I follow his distinct loud cry and find him roaring at the bottom of huge metallic snake-like slide. He holds out his arms to me for comfort and we sit hugging both his pain and my absolute mind-numbing fear of having lost my grandchild away. I decide playgrounds are not safe places. It seems that one in every ten children there is roaring because they’ve fallen, been pushed, have cut their knees or banged their head or are totally lost. I determined to exit this dreadful place with two under-fives and say never again. If I had to go through this once more I’d be in heart-attack country.

Instead, I learned to be wily and conserve my energy while using theirs. I would go to the huge green park behind their house and in encourage them to roll balls down steep hills. That way they would race down, again and again, staggering up steep slopes while I sat at the top conserving my limited reserves of energy.

When with small children you find yourself smiling a lot. They ask questions that take your breath away about dying, life, sweets, bullying and then off they go at top speed. I want to summon up the very best of me to meet this challenge. To banish meanness or deflection. To answer and engage honestly. But as energy levels bottom, the challenges become harder.

I fight the weariness and try to hold tight to good humour. They deserve to be safe and nurtured. It should be the very least I achieve. But being older at least give you experience and a certain kind of knowledge of what works for you and what doesn’t. What counts against you is the terrifying responsibility. The need for constant vigilance, watching where they are and what they do. Being older one sees potential dangers on all sides. A moment of absentmindedness or distraction, this must be fought at all costs. But this war of attrition wears you down. I watch their parents carry this load lightly. Wrestling, throwing them around wasting valuable energy. Putting on music and dancing with the children, exuberant with their love and time. I marshal energy resources as if it was my last breath. Determined to make it last until little heads are fast asleep, safe in bed with pyjamas and all snug. Then the edifice collapses I fold into bed as if clubbed. Desperate that my battery is recharged. A miracle of rejuvenation is necessary!  It comes early when just after 6 AM two little angels come to my bedside again. Then, drawing deep from hugs and kisses, granny emerges from her cocoon to fly for love again.

“Love is the cause of God’s revelation unto man, the vital bond inherent, in accordance with the divine creation, in the realities of things.  Love is the one means that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next.  Love is the light that guideth in darkness, the living link that uniteth God with man, that assureth the progress of every illumined soul.”

Baha’is Writings