If There's Anything Better Than Kids, It's Grandchildren
We just arrived at my parents’ home. My daughter almost forgot about me since we’re here. She started jumping and dancing around the house the moment she crossed the door, and has been playing, singing and laughing with my parents ever since.
This girl loves her grandparents with all her heart. And so do they, more than anything in the world. I’ve never seen my dad as gentle, patient and enthusiastic as he is around my baby. She truly brings out the best in him.
I’m trying to be this patient and enthusiastic with her too, but you can’t pay this much attention to one person all day every day. At one point someone has to buy groceries or reply to an important email, to have a conversation with someone else than their kid or do things faster than they would prefer. Even if I wanted to, I can’t make my daughter my entire world. All I can do is make sure there are enough other people that she can trust and rely on as well.
That’s why I’m grateful my parents will happily pay all of their attention to my kid for a few days at a time. My mom says this is much easier than raising her own kids. You can take a break whenever you want to, get decent sleep, and spoil them a little bit without worrying how they’re going to turn out. Someone once told me that grandchildren are the reward for all the hard work you’ve put into raising kids.
My parents get to hang out with the most adorable baby girl who loves them dearly. The baby girl gets to experience more flavors of unconditional love, to feel that there are other people besides her parents who’d live and die for her. I get to know my parents from their most wonderful and joyous side - and also to take a break. We all get something beautiful out of this relationship.
Every few months my husband and I begin to wonder if we should perhaps move somewhere abroad. I live on solar power and the only way to make me happy and productive in December is to go to a warm and sunny place. We love the sea and blue mountain lakes, and our city has neither. Why wouldn’t we make a warm, sunny and mountainous place our permanent home?
But given a choice between all the sunshine in the world and my baby girl living close to her grandparents, I’ll choose the latter without hesitation. She loves them way too much to only see them once or twice a year. And I can only hope that one day, given a similar choice she will too let me help out with her kids. If having her is the best thing that happened to me already, I can’t wait to find out how joyous grandchildren can be.
Grandparents are special! Your daughter will always cherish her time spent with them, I’m sure. This was also the case in my childhood, and I’m so grateful for having been raised, in part, by my grandparents. (I attribute my curiosity in large part to my paternal grandmother, which she nurtured in me from the youngest years as she took me on long walks around the neighborhood - this was in Moscow, Russia over 20-25 years ago.)
At the risk of being patronising if you're already aware of this, have you tried a lot more light? Eliezer Yudkowsky's wife suffered from SAD that standard lightbox therapy couldn't cure, noticed that, bright though they are, therapeutic lightboxes still aren't going to give you anything like as much light as the sun in summer, so he just got a bunch of extra lamps, and apparently it worked.
See here https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/ (ctrl+f "seasonal") ... and see here for a preprint of a study, which is not terrible conclusive, but does find that just rigging up a lot more lights in your house works as well as specific lightbox therapy sessions, and tentatively suggests that adding more light is effective for more severe cases: http://web.archive.org/web/20211202031249/https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.29.21265530v1
Edit: though I should add, some people who have tried this seem to be saying that you ought to use UV filters if you're going to fill your house with an extreme amount of artificial lights, otherwise there is a risk of sunburn.