Staying over at your grandparents' house can be such a fun time. Or maybe not. Either way, it makes for an unforgettable memory.
We asked the BuzzFeed Community to share any wild stories they had about their kids after dropping them off at their grandparents' house. The best of those stories — and responses from a Reddit post — are below!
1. "At age four-ish, my daughter went to her Granny's house and proceeded to give herself a mullet with scissors she found. As you can kind of see in the picture, her hair went to the middle of her back. The only way to salvage it after the mullet was to cut it all chin length."
2. "My dad was 'fun grandpa' and loved hanging out with my kids. But he had a habit of shrugging off danger. I'll never forget the time I pulled up to pick up my three-year-old son and found him standing atop a fallen log, over a creek-bed in my parent's backyard, wearing sandals, swinging an actual hatchet & chopping away at the log between his feet. I nearly hyperventilated. My dad thought I was 'overreacting' since no one had lost a toe (yet)."
3. "My father in law once let my seven-year-old eat 20 chicken nuggets because she said that’s what she normally gets at McDonald’s. It’s true we get 20 nuggets, but that’s something we share amongst our family of four! He just took this information at face value and let her eat 20 frigging nuggets!!"
4. "My mom loves to give my two-year-old major choking hazards like whole peanuts, popcorn, marshmallows, tiny toys, and all the major no-nos with toddler food and playthings. She was a nurse her entire working career and raised three kids. How does she not know better? I worry about leaving him alone with her and I hate that."
5. "My father in law, bless his sweet, clueless heart, gave our two-year-old child a box cutter to play with. When we suggested this might not be the best toy, he said, 'Well he doesn't know how to open it.'"
6. "I came home to grandma and the kid awake together. Apparently, grandma didn't like sleep schedules and didn't understand why the decision wasn't hers to make. Sigh."
7. "My husband and I rarely get a date night to ourselves. It seems like anytime we’d ask my mom to watch our kids we come home and she’d have fed them a bunch of candy at like 8 o’clock at night. They would be bouncing off the walls when we’d get home. She did not even seem to notice that what she did was effectively sabotaging our time together."
8. "My dad was absent most my life, except for the good times, then he’d magically show up. Now that he’s a grandpa, he wants to do better. Eh... One weekend he wanted to have his grandson over for the night. Talked it over with my wife at the time, and okay. Picked up my son the next day, filthy, in a dirty diaper, and wreaking of piss. He hasn’t stayed over since."
9. "My late husband’s family had always been extremely nice and I thought they would be dependable babysitters. Boy, was I wrong. Every time they watch him it was something weird. The last time he spent the night, my MIL woke my son up at 4 a.m. — because she was up and bored — then didn’t think to give him breakfast or any food by the time I picked him up at 11 a.m. They are incapable of sticking to the schedule or following the rules."
10. "I can’t even leave the 16-month-old baby with grandma for an hour while I am napping in the same house. She is not on the ball, not paying enough attention or adequately assessing risks, and does not follow simple instructions."
11. "I write out EXACT lists on what to do (they are so simple too, 10 a.m. bottle then nap and that's usually about it). And they will need to ask a million questions, want to do things their way (which my kids don't respond to), and just make everything feel difficult. I stopped asking them to watch my kids because they couldn't get my toddler to eat or nap properly and he would come home starving and exhausted and want to nap late and then be up ALL night."
12. "My in-laws babysat during the day for a week when daycare was closed and they shoved our three-year-old in front of the TV all day."
13. "I let my mom babysit sometimes now that my kids are older, but she has so many rules now that I absolutely expect her to follow and she knows it. She used to never follow my rules and I stopped letting her babysit, no matter how much she asked. Back when I depended on her more for childcare she caused my husband and me absolute nonstop anxiety and so many problems that I stopped working completely."
14. "Last time my mom watched my two-year-old in my home, she didn’t notice he put the remote control in the dog bowl, ruining it. She also left him unattended in his learning tower in the kitchen. He got ahold of all my medication and dumped it in the sink full of dirty dishwater. She didn’t tell me until late that night so I couldn’t replace it until the next day. Insurance wouldn’t cover the replacement so I paid about $800 out of pocket. Never again."
15. "I dropped my (then) newborn son with my parents to watch him while I went to work and suddenly my mom started acting really confused and flustered, saying things like 'Have you left us enough information? What do we need to do to take care of him? We’ve never raised a newborn before!' She literally said this in front of me. And my brother. That she gave birth to and raised. Now that my son is 3.5 years old, she denies ever having said this."
16. "My father in law is a good man, but also, let's just say that he has four grandchildren and when the youngest needed a diaper change he fumbled around for a few minutes with a disposable diaper before loudly exclaiming, 'Oh, it's Velcro!.' He does wonderfully with the older grandkids, but has never taken care of an infant for more than a few minutes at a time in his whole life."
17. "I wouldn't call my daughter's grandparents necessarily 'incompetent' but more 'they don't think ahead.' They roll their eyes when I move scissors that have been left out within arm's reach, then are embarrassed when she comes back from a bedroom in their house holding three buttons and a goddamn battery."
18. "When I was two years old my parents left me with my grandparents while they went to run an errand...Or so they thought. My dad was in the military at the time and was able to take some time off to visit (just a little side note). Long story short, my grandparents called my parents to see if I was with them because they couldn't find me. My mom, I believe, was the one that informed them that she and my dad left me with my grandparents. This mix-up ended up with me getting hit by a car. My mom and dad took me to the hospital and surprisingly I only had some bruises and scratches."
19. "We have three sets of grandparents and one simply will not watch her. Another will absolutely beg to watch her, but then never change her diaper, make questionable decisions about safety and feed her nothing but sugar then wonder why she won’t sleep."
