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[quote=Anonymous]OP, just a tip--stop mentioning what you are doing with either set of parents to the other set of parents.  I've seen many families where when you give unnecessary information to the grandparents, they end up in a grandparent competition.  Even when they don't explicitly try, they end up feeling like they owe more time, money, resources to their grandchildren than the other grandparents give or do.

You mentioned that your mother was going to come and help watch the kids while you took a vacation.  You even added in that your daughter asked if her other grandmother was going to come.  Even if you explicitly say that you don't expect her to come, she's going to feel like a bad grandmother if she doesn't come, so she tried to promise more than she was willing to give because she felt guilted into being a better grandmother.  Then she realized it was more than she could commit to and backed out, feeling even worse.  The problem was that you put her in a lose-lose situation.  Either she doesn't come and she's the bad grandmother that doesn't come to visit when her granddaughter even asked if she was going to come, or she's the grandmother than didn't even offer to come out to help watch the kids while you two take a much needed vacation.

My MIL is also like this.  She's very well meaning, but she tries to keep track of what my parents do with our kids and tries to do at least as much, if not more.  It's hard because my parents are well off financially and my MIL is not.  So she feels extra guilty that she can't throw money at her grandchildren.  She also feels that she has to try to keep up with my parents.  It's worse because my spouse and I are both the youngest and we had kids late.  All of our siblings are older and had kids early.  That means that our kids are 16-20 years younger than all of their cousins and so they are the darlings of the family as essentially a generation to themselves.  My MIL was better off financially 20 years ago when her first grandchild was young and she was able to do more with him.  Now she feels bad that she can't even do the things with our kids that she did with my nephew.

We off-set all of this by only giving news about the grandparents to the other side but we don't give news about what the grandparents are doing with the kids.  We also try to compensate by doing things with my MIL that she wants to do with the kids and we do it together so that we can offset much of the cost to what she can afford.  So if she wants to take the kids somewhere, we pay for all of us to travel there and get the hotel or Air-BnB for all of us.  She gets her airfare on miles and pays for park tickets or whatever.  Then she feels that she was able to take the kids there.[/quote]

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