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[quote=Anonymous]What do you do when you do not trust a grandparent to babysit? How do you explain it to the grandparent?

We are going out of town this weekend. We arranged babysitting with bro and SIL a month ago. Today, FIL texted me to say he would be more than happy to stay with ds while we are gone. It was a short and friendly text in a nice tone of voice. I texted him back saying we already arranged for him to stay with my brother and SIL, but thank you!! Some hours pass. Then I get this weird text saying "I think that is great. Who am I anyway, I am just DS's father's father. Why do I deserve any opportunity to spend time with my grandson? Please drop the subject and don't ever think I will mention it again." My first thought is that he was kind of baiting me, seeing as though he knows we'd had this trip planned for over a month now...surely he knew we'd already locked down babysitting.

As for opportunity to spend time with his grandson, we just spent 3 days with him at the vacation home over 4th of July weekend. I can think of 3 other opportunities he's had to be with us in the past two months that he's cancelled last minute, or just plain didn't show up because he had the time wrong. This is actually the second time he's expressed irritation about us not asking him to watch ds while we're away (although it was more just eye rolling and mild scoffing last time). It really really rubs me the wrong way that he is gunning for this alone time with ds. Because my intuition/spidey sense has been up the past couple of years due to the way he doesn't respect ds's boundaries, and expresses affection in an unusually...I don't know, weird way (I'm having a hard time convincing DH of this, and I admit it's just a bad vibe and anything concrete isn't obvious). Also, just to keep this brief, he has some basic issues that come with aging that make him not the best option for full responsibility of a 3 year old, even to the point of us wondering about the onset of dementia because of some of the things he says and does.

So, what do we do? How do I tell him we don't trust him to babysit? I know we're not the only people to have to deal with this.[/quote]

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