La Familia
Grandparents exist to spoil their grandchildren. Grandparents are retired and many times lonely so they welcome any sort of interaction even if it is with a 2 year old, 5 year old, 10 year old, etc. Now normally, spoiling your grandchildren is easy - give them noisy toys that will instantly sound shrill to the ears of the parents or load the kids up on candy and have them running around hyperactive. But when you all live under one roof, like my friendly Armenian neighbors, what do you do? Any annoying, noisy toy you buy them will annoy not only their parents, but you too. Any hyperactivity due to the candy you stuff in their little faces, you have to endure as well as their parents. And if you don’t discipline them, their problems will become your problems because you have to live in the same 900 square feet.
Well, in my building, these live-in grandparents spoil their grandchildren like all other grandparents and then they sit outside in the courtyard drinking Turkish coffee, playing backgammon/chess and chatting with their other grandparently friends at a noise-level louder than the grandchildren they’re trying to escape as they are old and deaf. So that leaves the rest of us who live in the building not only having to deal with the loud screaming, sugar-overdosed grandchildren in the apartments beneath us but with the old cronies chatting at a level even louder than the grandchildren’s screams in the courtyard outside our living rooms.
Lovely.