By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When we took my son to a play center called Imagine That in 1993, he often chose to pirouette around in a tutu. Don’t try this at home, kids. Let’s just say my then-investment banker husband was tolerant of many things, but even at Imagine That, he didn’t want to imagine this. He’d roll his eyes and wait for my son to decide he’d rather be the fire fighter than the prima ballerina.

What kids wear is obviously not always a parental prerogative. Fast forward 25 years when my stepson, who’s the only one of my four children to have reproduced thus far, ran an earnest and hard-fought campaign against the color pink. Initially my second husband and I obliged with a gender-neutral layette for our baby granddaughter. Then my granddaughter turned 3 and announced that her favorite color was purple. Ok. So much for politically correct color choices.

As a grandparent, I have learned to stay silent on many things, including clothing selection. (Incidentally, this was not the case when I was a parent and my late husband took my son to Disney after our second child was born. My husband dressed my son in a shirt with a tiger and shorts with a lion. Forget the clashing colors; this was intra-species warfare.)

I’m quiet because I feel fortunate to be a grandma at all. In a second marriage to a husband who’s ten years older than I am, I lucked into grandmother-hood when my biological sons were still debating whether to get dogs.

I try to be as helpful and affirming as I can of the choices made by my stepson and daughter- in-law. I don’t always succeed. But for the most part, I’m doing a pretty decent impersonation of a chill grandmother. I wonder if it will last.

With my own boys, I know I worried too much about things like intake of sugar and reading time. Once I remember yelling at my son because I thought he cheated at “Pin The Tail On The Donkey”. I behaved as if I were raising a future embezzler. He was four.

Right now with my granddaughter, I’m still in the category of grandmother slash celebrity. Celebrities aren’t always known for setting limits. Ice cream for breakfast anyone? Anyway I plan to milk my status as Grandma Good Time for as long as I can. It’s great coming into a room and having someone, other than a dog, run towards me making tons of noise as they move in for a kiss.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I don’t even look at my watch like I used to with my own kids when I play with my granddaughter on the floor. Maybe my first husband’s death taught me that if time passes slowly, it’s actually a good thing.

Watching my granddaughter flip on the small trampoline in the corner, painting at the craft table, having tea parties with the few stuffed animals that fit into the toy high chair — we can be busy in the basement for hours. Well, for an hour anyway.

Ironically given my experience with children in costumes, my granddaughter often gravitates to her costume rack. This is the one toy my boys never owned. I don’t remember a lot of in-home dress up time. It was hard enough to get the boys to change out of their pajamas.

“Is this Sleeping Beauty?” I ask as I look at the pin on the collar of the gown I’ve helped my granddaughter step into.

“No, Grandma,” she says. “I’m Cinderella.”

She’s Cinderella. Really? I think the character on the pin looks more like Sleeping Beauty. I don’t argue. I don’t even say what I want to, that a woman who pursues the prince is sometimes destined to be disappointed.

In fact, I say nothing. If I’ve learned anything in 28 years at this parenting gig, it’s that sometimes it’s okay to just stand and smile when someone puts on a tutu.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My 3-year-old granddaughter assumes that all people are good and that all dogs are friendly. Maybe when your grandmother has agreed to allow you to have a cupcake with rainbow frosting for breakfast, you can afford to adopt this magnanimous worldview.

Anyway, this was how I found myself on Maplewood Avenue Tuesday morning at 10:30 standing just a few steps away from the face of a very large dog. My granddaughter moved in close, barely getting out the words “is your dog friendly?” before she bent down for a mouth kiss that was reciprocated thankfully not by the man with the leash but by the dog.

Let’s just say there is no walking somewhere quickly with a 3-year-old.

Before Tuesday, my relationship with the town of Maplewood had been simple; I struggled to park and I did what I had to do fast. Typically I paid no attention to what was unfolding on the sidewalks. This was not the case Tuesday when thanks to my granddaughter, I encountered a modern-day version of Richard Scarry’s Busytown. All that was missing were the chipmunks delivering mail and the squirrels wearing construction hats.

As soon as she was finished with the dog, my granddaughter turned to a man unloading boxes of arugula and quinoa from a large truck, which he then slid down a ramp into a basement. There, a second man waited and piled boxes. “What these men doing, Grandma?” my granddaughter asked. I explained that what kept these men busy was called a job. They were delivering packages of food for a restaurant called Sprout.

My granddaughter wanted to edge closer to the opening in the street that led to the basement, hoping I think, to watch the boxes reach their destination. She put her hands on her hips. “I want to do this job, too,” she said to the man on the sidewalk. I told her that would be fine as long as she stayed far away from the yawning chasm in the sidewalk.

It turns out my granddaughter is an equal opportunity sidewalk spectator. As long as I accommodated her, she was willing to do what I wanted, an admirable trait in a little girl. I told her I hoped to walk around the corner to see if a new restaurant had opened. I reached down to grab her hand. She wouldn’t take it. “Only when we cross streets, Grandma,” she said. “I’m a big girl now.” Well yes. She ran a little ahead of me and turned back a few feet before she reached the corner. “Now, Grandma,” she prompted.

Hand in hand, we made our way across the street and faced a building that looked like a construction site with paper over the windows and what looked like some drills, a horse, and other equipment on the sidewalk. Of course, in keeping with the Scarry theme, there was a man with a construction hat standing right outside. I asked him about the opening date of the restaurant.

He shared a date, two weeks hence and told me kids were welcome, gesturing at my granddaughter. She appraised him carefully. “Do you have any meatballs?” she asked. “I love meatballs.”

What I find so refreshing with my granddaughter is that we don’t set goals. Days I’m with her, I try not to work. I stop caring how many steps I’ve gotten or even if I’m eating healthily. Make room for scones and giant hot pretzels, everyone. It’s those little things that make the day. I wish I’d been this wise with my own children. But I made them much more neurotic than I should have. I cared way too much about what seem 25 years later like irrelevant details. Did you brush long enough? Am I reading to you every night? Can you count to 10? Can you spell your name? Education, I know now, doesn’t happen with lessons. It occurs in random moments.

With a 3-year-old, even when nothing really happens, it can seem like everything.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

In 2019 little kids and their younger siblings come with gadgets I never had as a young mother: the light that spins and projects beautiful images on the ceiling, the food processor that purées homemade veggies into baby food, the bottle warmer that makes sure formula doesn’t stay chilly, and the diaper pail that spins human waste beyond recognition. But the most confounding of all is the sound machine.

Fortunately the sound machine also comes with my 3-year-old granddaughter, who on a regular basis, interprets its intricacies for the technologically challenged.

My husband and I lie about our facility with the sound machine. Even though we always pretend we can do it, we can’t work it at all. It’s shameful to admit that we’re confounded by something tiny and sweet that plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.

The device is designed as an aid for parents trying to get a young child to sleep. Apparently, there is no dispensation for incompetent grandparents.

The sound machine looks like a miniature Bose radio. It’s attractive, streamlined and compact. It should be as simple to use as it is to look at. It isn’t.

Soothing? Forget it. I have so much anxiety about getting the sound machine to work that I need a Xanax to recover from the thought of it.

It’s supposed to lull a child to sleep by playing music that no one who wants to remain sane can listen to for long. That’s why children eventually give up and go to sleep.

Did you ever realize that the tunes for Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep are exactly the same? No, I bet not. Those are the random thoughts you have after you’ve listened to the sound machine for an excruciating 45 minutes.

Every time my granddaughter sleeps over, we plug the sound machine in, which in itself is a five-minute proposition because the thing comes with a detachable cellphone-like cord that’s perennially stuffed somewhere in the overnight bag. To compound the situation, the sound machine has so many random holes to make it aesthetically pleasing, we never can locate the one that actually connects to the cord.

Then we look at the tiny buttons that supposedly make the music play and press them haphazardly. It’s like her stroller and her car seat, which to us are an unfathomable collection of buttons and straps and plugs that only the spawn of Einstein, and my granddaughter, can figure out.

To sleep my granddaughter requires lights out, shades drawn, doors closed and every eensy weensy shred of light, like a cellphone screen flashlight, extinguished. So usually it’s totally dark by the time we have to turn on the sound machine. We end up fumbling around with the thing like idiots and by that time of night — ok, it’s 7:30 — we’re so exhausted that we can hardly see. Keep in mind that we’ve put our glasses down somewhere in the room, and because it’s pitch black, they might as well be in Timbuktu.

In spite of our efforts and sporadic pressing of buttons, the sound machine stays silent and dark. Each time, it takes a 3-year-old to decipher and turn on the device. For a near-58 year old, the sound machine is a a puzzle that’s clearly intended to be tackled only by members of Mensa and preschoolers.

Luckily my granddaughter is inordinately patient with the sound-machine challenged. She gamely offers to jump out of bed and turn it on for us, which sort of defeats its whole purpose, which is to get her to relax and drift off.

Fortunately for me, the sound machine and other assorted appliances also come with my granddaughter. Her favorite words are “let me show you, Grandma.” God, I hope she never gets tired of saying them.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m a curmudgeon on a mission. My granddaughter’s crime? She wants Dipping Dots, and I spend about a third of the walk to the ice cream store railing against them.

If you’re eating Dipping Dots, you might as well be ingesting linoleum, I tell my granddaughter. They’re chemicals; they have to be. How else does something that looks like colorful dots morph into ice cream when you touch it with a spoon? Would you eat driveway pavement if it came in primary colors? I really shouldn’t expect an answer from a three-year-old.

Dipping Dots are an affront to the wholesomeness of our biweekly ice cream parlor expedition. My rant does not faze my granddaughter. She pedals her bike with training wheels over the bumpy cement sidewalk, and when I put my hand on her back to provide some stability, she tells me she doesn’t need it. No Grandma, she says; I got this.

Apparently she knows what else she’s got: a simp for a grandmother. I’m just the grandma who can’t say no. Much as I hate Dipping Dots, we stop at the newsstand that sells ice cream in packages and gummy things made out of sugar that are terrible for her teeth. She chooses Dipping Dots in American flag colors — oh goody, patriotic tooth decay — and something green that will no doubt remain in her teeth for the duration. As usual, she tells me not to worry. Her other grandma is a dentist, and I feel a vague sense of foreboding that multiple dental visits are in my son’s future as I pay for the Dipping Dots and the olive green gummy thing whose name I do not remember. We’re saving these for later, I tell my granddaughter, and I hope by the time later comes, she will have forgotten about them.

Are you sure you don’t want real ice cream? I finally ask. It’s way better than Dipping Dots. The truth is I want real ice cream. I am just using my granddaughter as an excuse — you know how it is. I want to set a good example of what it’s like to be a woman who eats healthily and at almost 58 has no illusions about having the body of a 20-year-old. It’s not because I love ice cream and crave chocolate. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves.

Luckily, my granddaughter agrees to actual ice cream as long as I hold onto the Dipping Dots. Really? I’d like to demote this plastic-covered imposter to the garbage can — permanently. With all the plastic I’m toting, I worry that in the town I’m babysitting in, I’ll be outed as some kind of an environmental pariah.

The plastic bag goes on one of the handlebars and the bucket of chalk she insisted on carrying goes on the other. I’m not sure what we’re meant to do with the chalk other than transport it. I imagine us as sidewalk artists, a la the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins or creators of colorful hopscotch boards. This is not to be.

The town ice cream store has become our thing — or at least that’s what I tell myself. It’s our routine, what I hope she will think about when she thinks about grandma. My granddaughter and I set out from her house every other week for this simple errand. I get a vegan scoop, so I can feel virtuous. My granddaughter always chooses a flavor called Superman and she adds sprinkles. Superman is a red, white and blue concoction that is an amalgamation of food coloring and sugar and that, I suppose, would be better eaten in a cape. It mostly makes her sticky, and we always ask the boy who sells the ice cream to wet the napkin we give him in the sink that’s behind the counter. That’s part of the adventure — the wiping of my granddaughter’s face and the end point on this ice cream eating journey, the indication that it’s time to turn home.

Going for ice cream with my granddaughter is not just about ordering kid-sized cups. Her innocence and enthusiasm are infectious. Every man of a certain age who walks in is a daddy. The little girl with a plaid skirt and pink backpack who, like my granddaughter, orders a Superman cup is a long-lost friend. The ice cream scoopers who also roll the pizza dough for the pepperoni pies the store sells are curiosities. Grandma, what are those men doing? Everything she sees is new, and being able to view it with her makes even the mundane seem exotic.

And therein lies my real objection to Dipping Dots. They’re artificial. Their fake-ness makes them an outlier on this ice cream journey. You don’t scoop them. They have no smell. No one over the age of ten even eats them.

And as if to punctuate the point about how unwelcome they are, the Dipping Dots ultimately end up in a melted mess on the sidewalk, back on the cement where they so clearly belong. They co-mingle with the chalk after the two wheeler that I’m walking for my granddaughter, who runs ahead, topples over. Kaboom. My granddaughter laughs. It’s a Dipping Dot disaster, I tell her. A point of interest: Dipping Dots don’t only turn into ice cream when they’re poked with a spoon. The same thing happens to them when they have a collision with a bucket of chalk on the sidewalk. They liquefy and become a sticky atrocity, a breeding ground for desperate Dachshunds and frenetic flies.

Adios, Dipping Dots. We hardly knew you. All I can say is thank god, we never ate you.