I’m going to make an excellent grandparent.

All the fun of parenting without the baby weight, right? No worrying about whether that tantrum I let Abby throw the other night will lead to her joining a gang. No late nights up with a sick kid. No coming home from a day at work to a child who wants to play The Battle of Wills, a really awful game with rules that stress that the winner never really wins, anyhow. But let’s play. ALL THE TIME.

I’m going to be awesome at it – grandparenting, not the Battle of Wills – I thought the other afternoon when I tried to sneak out the front door to grab the mail. I didn’t have both feet outside the door when Abby caught me with her freakishly observant peripheral vision.

“MAMA! ABBY HELP!” she cried, dropping her train on the carpet as she leapt up.

“I can get it, Abby, don’t worry about it,” I tried. No luck. She had to go outside with me. She had to open the box, hold the bills; she saw the tiniest piece of chalk on the sidewalk and wanted to play CHALK! ABBY PAY CHALK!, but the baby was in the house alone, so Bad Mama said “No, we’ll do that later. We have to go back inside.”

The tantrum that followed was the worst three minutes of her life – even worse than a half hour before that, when I shattered all her illustrator dreams with one flying leap while screeching “Eeee! Stop! Abby, no!” as her pudgy hand held a fat crayon over a library book. I could have a lucrative career in acrobatics if this journalism gig I have doesn’t pan out.

Flying tricks aside, these tantrums are filling up a greater percentage of our days than even a few weeks ago. We waver between firmly saying “no” and then stepping back to give her room to tantrum-ize in peace, and just paying the ransom – reading her one more book at bedtime; packing my purse with fruit snacks; letting her wear her sweatshirt outside in July. This is what experts might call weak. Inconsistent. Ineffective.

Yeah, I know. But it’s not like we’re wavering on the important stuff – sunscreen, milk at dinnertime, using her car seat, Rolling Stones over sing-along-songs. We have standards.

Even re-reading that little mailbox scenario now, though, it’s easy to see these tantrums coming and to think her helpfulness is cute, and to think that geez, I just need to be a little creative in my redirecting her attention.

It’s just so much different when you’re IN that tantrum. Sigh.