So You Think You're a Cool Grandparent?

In this technologically challenging time it's difficult to keep up with all the gizmos and gadgets. I'm barely proficient at programming my home DVR. Now I just learned I can record programs on my DVR from my cell phone. All these things come second nature to our eight year old granddaughter. When she asked me if I knew the Jonas Brothers, I thought she was quoting biblical scripture. I needed to work on being a cool grandparent if I ever expected my grandchildren to visit me. Gone are the days when faking your way through their text generated lingo qualifies you as cool. I enlisted the help of a few of my old GPB's - that's text for grandparent buddies. We decide to take action; to become the cool grandparents we know we can be. But how? Perhaps a test? We'd need to collect viable research. Where do our savvy, high-tech grandkids congregate . . . THE MALL! Our quest begins.

We piled into my SUV and drove to the local mall. To help us with our grandparent communication skills we realized we would need cool new phones, you know the kind with hundreds of apps, ring-tones and other confounding stuff. Too many to choose from - we panicked and left the store. Our next stop at the trendy sports wear store to get the newest street gear and possibly some free swag. Our grandkids say that swag is cool even though we didn't know what it meant. We didn't purchase anything but bagged some swag.

With our free swag in tow, we continued on to the Body Piercing and Tattoo shop picked up a couple of flash sheets and temporary tattoos. The guy in the shop had his eyelid pierced and a tattoo of broccoli on his wrist that I'm sure was influenced by dear old mom. Always eat your vegetables before piercing delicate parts of your body, son; I digress. We stopped at least a dozen times to find the restrooms. Hey, we are grandparents and in our vocabulary - high is followed by fiber.

Onward to music stores where we spent hours thumbing through thin plastic sleeves holding DVD's, Blue Ray, High Def, iPod stuff. No one brought along their reading glasses so we couldn't read the -0 point typeface on the jackets. What ever happened to vinyl, black and shiny records with grooves? Where do you think us old timers got the term groovin'? From there we needed caffeine and tried to order coffee, black, no sugar, please. A young gal asked, "Eh, do you want that low-fat, no fat, red-eye, skim, grandee, mondo, mocha, macchiato?" Rather than have her repeat the choices a third time, we sneaked out the café side door suffering in silence from caffeine withdraw.

Our quest completed, we came back to my place, put on a pot of black coffee and came up with the following to determine what does makes a cool grandparent cool. Below is what we chose as our top ten questions.

Are You A Cool Grandparent? Take our test and find out:

1. What are Apps?
2. What genre of entertainment are Lady GaGa, Plain White Tees, and Fountains of Wayne?
3. The movie Twilight portrays what type of dark characters?
4. In snowboarding slang what does BOTWOKER mean?
5. What are Phineas and Ferb
6. On what gaming systems will you find Super Meat Boy and Mass Effect II?
7. Where would you find Farmville, Mafia Wars and Farmtown
8. Who sings, "Party in the USA"
9. If they tell you, "Just txt me and I'll hit you back" what are they telling you to do?
10. If your grandchild says, "Wow you are stone old schoolin' it" what does that mean?

I thought about providing you with the answers, however, a truly cool grandparent would just download a search engine app on their touch phone and Google the answers. Being a cool grandparent is fun, but the best grandparents are people who love, listen and enjoys their grandkids even when they don't have a clue what they are talking about. So when your grandkids tell you what cool grandparents you are just smile and say, "We're so glad you are in our life, and no we're not leaving you the Maserati."