Kadiera's Playground Cute but Evil - it averages out

I find the ongoing swirl of competition and drama from Alexander's grandparents to be rather odd. Not that I didn't expect him to have their full attention - even before he was conceived, it was obvious that they'd all want their "fair share" of him, whatever that means.

I spent very little time as a kid with my mother's family. Part of that was that they were so terribly disfunctional that it was probably best that we didn't spend a lot of time with them.

But the bigger part was that they all lived far away, and my dad seems to honestly have believed that "we" (mom and me and my brothers) didn't need that side of the family, because all his family was right there near us, so we had a family and didn't need another.

I think I can count on both hands the number of times we saw my grandparents (collectively - because of divorces, there were three households in two states) by the time I went to college. There wasn't even necessarily a yearly trip to visit some portion of them - whole years went by where my grandparents were known by a phone call or two (because long distance was expensive and dad didn't like long calls) and the Christmas presents they sent. Grandma L's presents were always shipped wrapped in wrapping paper and brown paper, and tied with a string - with all the paper falling off. Grandpa W usually sent nothing, but left us good stuff when we did see him (like the Christmas when I was around 4 or 5 that I got a fairly large sum of money as a birthday present because he dumped several handfulls of change on the table and told me I could keep whatever I could count, not realizing that I *could* count money and make change). Grandpa T usually had large boxes arriving at the last minute, because he worked at the post office and knew their regulations to the letter - and his box usually had all the candy and nuts that went in our stockings, a tradition that my father never did get the hang of, because stockings are something you hang for decoration, not for actual use.

Yes, Grandma & Grandpa H were at our house a couple times a week. They made sure we had a roof over our heads and food on the table, but they weren't big on special events or special gifts. Even so, visits tended to be planned out, even if the evening's events were planned while me and dad stopped on our way home at the bar my grandfather often stopped at for a drink on his way home from work.

Thus, I find it interesting that my dad is so keyed up about coming to visit - if his argument from my childhood held sway, he needn't come visit because we have family here. I understand my mother's insistence on visiting family now that they're divorced...but it seems like her visits are more because she thinks she should than because she wants to, in some respects. I know that my in-laws have often seemed to believe that we somehow owe them a child, so their behavior has been much in keeping with that ongoing theme. But all in all, I find it strange that the "one week notice" request has been pretty much ignored by all of them.

Figuring out how to manage this is going to be a challenge.