It���s Only Hide and Seek If They Look For You

Grandparenting Tip of the Day:

When playing multi-generational hide and seek, choose your hiding spot carefully.

I spent some precious time with my grandchildren this week, after a rough year of very little contact due to the pandemic. It was glorious fun!

On a couple of occasions, we engaged in some entertaining rounds of Hide and Seek. The adults hid alongside the kids and we had a lot of laughs and ���difficulty��� finding the littlest ones at times. (Little kids are very good at hiding, you know ��� even when they repeatedly tell you exactly wherethey���re hiding!)

During the last round of the last game before everyone went home, I decided to cleverly hide in a spot that none of the kids had used yet ��� behind a set of long drapes in a bedroom.

The game went off the rails soon after that.

The eight-year-old was the ���seeker���. He found the two-year-old and the eleven-year-old, and had come into the room where I was hiding, but he didn���t see me.

Then there was no movement or sounds of any seeking going on.

After a long number of minutes, the 13-year-old and the almost-five-year-old called from the basement to let the seeker know, ���We���re down here!���

No response from the seeker. Or the other two.

I kept listening and couldn���t hear any sounds except for the gentle conversation between the two who had been found ��� with the little one telling her bigger cousin that she loved him.

Then the 13-year-old and five-year-old took turns coming partway up the stairs to loudly yell that ���We���re in the basement!���

No response from the seeker.

���What���s taking them so long?��� the five-year-old asked her older cousin, who finally came all the way upstairs ��� only to find out that the seeker had to stop mid-seek because he had to go to the bathroom.

Hmmm��� Now I, the grandma, had a decision to make.

Should I abandon my excellent hiding spot and go visit with the parents of these kids or should I stand firm and wait until the game resumed?

Well, I���m no quitter.

So I stayed.

I stood awkwardly behind the drapes, trying to ignore the cramping in my left calf muscle and then my right. I also tried not to cough or sneeze or breathe too deeply.

I glanced at my Fitbit. Probably 10 or 15 minutes had gone by since I had last heard any commotion that resembled ���seeking.��� What to do, what to do���

I finally heard the bathroom door open and then the combined voices of the older kids and the younger kids ��� and the seeker!

No! It couldn���t be!

They���d abandoned the game and had forgotten about Grandma!

A few minutes later, I decided I actually was a quitter after all ��� in this situation anyway.

I came out of the bedroom and said to the kids gathered together in the next room, ���I guess the game is over. And you didn���t find me.���

There were looks of surprise, shock and dismay when the older ones asked, ���Were you hiding?��� and I answered, ���Yes. All this time.���

Then there were many looks of embarrassment among the older kids, especially the little seeker.

Oops.

To his defence, I had not been playing in every single game, so it was a little harder to remember whether he was supposed to find me or not. Anyway��� we smiled and carried on.

I still love them all dearly, but it will be awhile before I find a super great hiding place again.

Next time, I���ll go back to sitting in the middle of the floor with a blanket haphazardly thrown over my head. They���ll surely find me there, right?