In 2006, at the ripe age of 50, Jonas arrived via Amazon Express before electric vehicles existed. Just kidding. He came FedEx.

Like most grandfathers, we show up at the hospital, we yooo and ahhh, we look at the baby, try not to act out of place and then we go look for a coffee bar to talk about we how we feel about all that. Just kidding.  Like most men surrounded by womenfolk, we do what we’ve been programmed to do: Think sports bar, football and guys sitting around talking football.

Rachel was full‑time at the time, had six weeks off, and about week five the misses come to me and says, “Would you like to watch our grandson and keep him out of daycare?” I thought about it for a minute and said, “Okay. Sounds cool.” And thus began the second of the greatest life‑learning experiences I’ve ever had. I would later sit at a wine about all this. Not kidding.

Day one: scared shitless. I literally held him all day. Day two: I realized little people are pretty tough. They don’t break that easy. Cool. I got this. Was I in for a huge light‑bulb moment. Here it is no fluff.

First: the absolute, nonstop, I‑will‑kill‑myself monotony of the first couple months. I’d show up at the apartment, Rachel would go to work, Jonas would wake up, change diaper, give him milk, we’d stare at each other for an hour, he’d go to sleep for two hours, wake up, change diaper, give him milk, stare at each other again, sleep again… someone help me. WTF was I thinking. How do mothers do this? I thought work was hard. I thought being married was hard. I thought shoveling pea gravel on a roof was hard. I thought….please stop me.

What I slowly began to realize was how much a woman’s life changes in a moment. It’s not just a different direction. It’s a complete recalibration of life, values, and what matters time.  They become masters at balancing married with children. Meanwhile the husband comes home from “having a hard day,” what's for dinner, thinking the wife has been home all day. Your home all day. How hard could it be?

Well, true saying: If it was easy, men would be doing it.

But not only did I get the hang of it, later, with a Mazda pickup, a credit card, and time, in the words of Ferris Bueller: What are we not going to have time to do today?  We explored everything from Houston to Galveston and all points in between. I’d drop him off home, then go work a few hours at Barnes & Noble. It was a change from the ordinary. A change from the typical husband‑married‑life role. It was a change from going through the motions, to a life doing something important.

It was a change in how I began to show up.

Just over two years after Jonas arrived, Sydney showed up.  No problem, or so I thought. When Rachel dropped both kids off on her way to work, the life Jonas and I had carved out took a hard left turn into “OMG what is happening here.” Rachel left, and Sydney started crying… and didn’t stop for about six years.  Okay, slight exaggeration. But that first day? I called Rachel and said, “You may need to come home.” She cried for two hours straight and nothing we did made a dent.

Then as if the universe felt sorry for me, she suddenly stopped. I called Rachel back and said, “Stay. I got this.”  And that’s when I learned something important: you are born with a personality. You don’t shape it as much as it shapes you.  Over the next four years, Chris’s two boys joined the summer chaos. My job if you want to call it that was simple: watch. The goal was to return them to their mother in the same number of pieces she dropped them off in.

The Pool

We had a swimming pool in our backyard. The kind that turned every Texas summer into a small universe of splashing, yelling, and sunburns. At some point, I found these big pirate boats on eBay ridiculous, things that floated just well enough to make the kids believe they were commanding a fleet. I didn’t buy them because I thought they’d last. I bought them because I knew the memory would. There’s something about watching kids in water. They forget the world. They forget the rules. They forget everything except the moment they’re in.

Summer Food

Food was simple back then. Hawaiian rolls, a slice of turkey, a slice of cheese. Nothing that couldn't be reached in the fridge by little people, nothing fancy, nothing that needed a recipe. Just the kind of quick, poolside fuel kids grab with wet hands before running back to whatever adventure they were in the middle of.  Watermelon! The universal favorite kid food of all time, the thing every kid grabs with both hands, juice running down their wrists.

Last but possible the most important. Popsicles. If you failed to get plenty of those, you could find yourself delayed into the Grandfather Hall of Fame. You only commit that foul once. You are then forgiven.   I didn’t think of it as a tradition. But looking back, it was one of those small rituals that defined our summers without us ever naming it.

“Paw Paw, Watch This”

And through all of it, the pool, the pirate boats, the Hawaiian rolls, the watermelon, popsicles, there was one phrase I heard a thousand times:

“Paw paw, watch this.”

It didn’t matter what the “this” was. A jump into the deep end. A new way of steering a pirate boat. A handstand that lasted two seconds.  Kids don’t ask you to watch because the act is impressive. They ask because your attention makes the moment real.

That’s the quiet truth of being a grandparent. You become the witness, the steady pair of eyes they look for before they leap. They don’t need advice. They don’t need correction. They just need you to see them fully, honestly, without distraction.

And every time they yelled “Paw paw, watch this,” what they were really saying was: “Be here with me. Right now. In this moment.”  And there it is.  Another lesson.  Kids don't have the words or the language.  Just show up and pay attention.  A universal truth I live by today. 

I didn’t know it then, but those words were the soundtrack of my summers. The echo that followed me long after the pool was quiet and the pirate boats were gone, the splash of the water, the sweetness of watermelon, the simple food on paper plates.

The Reflection

Grandkids arrive as reminders that time is not a straight line. They carry pieces of people they’ve never met, echoes of choices made long before they were born, and a kind of unfiltered hope that adults forget to practice, that certain innocent’s we lose becoming adults.

My role isn’t to shape them. My role is to be the steady point they can return to while they figure out who they are.

When I look at my grandkids, I don’t see “the future.” I see continuity. I see the long thread of choices, mistakes, recoveries, and small victories that began long before they were born.

They carry echoes of stories they don’t yet know. And somehow, without trying, they remind me that time is layered.  Some days those moments seamed long, sometimes tedious. I now realize it was over before I understand the deeper meaning of what I had been part of.  But then that has been most of my life.  My children having children.  How did this happen. I don’t know. I’m just grateful for the chance to witness how it all unfolded.