What to Write in a New Grandparents Card

Address the grandparents, not the baby over their heads

A new grandparents card has a recipient problem that a new baby card never has. Two cards are being written at once in most people's heads: one to the parents about the baby, and one to the grandparents about becoming grandparents. The words for the first card are easy to find, because baby cards are everywhere. So the first card's words leak into the second, and the grandparents open an envelope with their own names on it and find a welcome message for a child, plus a line at the end saying they will be wonderful at it.

They may well be wonderful at it. That is not the news. The news, for them, is a change in who they are in the family: a son or daughter of theirs now has a child, a house they have lived in for thirty years is about to hold a third generation, and a name they have answered to since childhood is about to be joined by a second name that a small person will shout across a park. Write to that change. The baby will get cards by the dozen, addressed correctly, from people who have never met the grandparents at all.

A practical test helps before you seal anything. Read the card back and cross out every sentence that could sit, unchanged, inside the parents' card. What is left is the grandparents card. If nothing is left, start again, and start with the grandparents' own facts: how long they waited, what they said on the phone, the room they cleared, the drive they will now make in the other direction. Cordelia's second card began with the blue curtain, because she had sewn it herself in February for a baby she had not been sure she could mention out loud. That detail belonged to her. No parent card could have used it.

Sign it to both grandparents where there are two, and name them separately inside if their parts differ. One may have cried on the phone while the other went quiet and started measuring the stairs for a gate. A card that notices each of them gets kept.

The announcement, the wait and the birth are three different cards

Timing changes what a card is allowed to say. At the announcement, usually around the end of the first three months, the grandparents know a fact and almost nothing else. No name, often no sex, sometimes a date that will move twice. A card written then should congratulate them on the news and on nothing more specific. It should not plan a christening, predict a likeness, or promise visits in a month nobody has chosen. Those cards read, six months later, like a weather forecast kept on the fridge after the weather changed.

During the wait, a second kind of card exists, and it is underused. The middle months are long for grandparents in a way they are not for parents. The parents have appointments, scans, furniture arriving in boxes. The grandparents have a date circled and a phone that stays quiet for weeks at a time, and many of them are careful not to ask too often, because asking too often is the first fault a new grandparent is warned about. A short card in that stretch, saying only that you are thinking of them and that the spare room news reached you, does work no birth card can do. It tells them they are in the story before the baby arrives to take it over.

After the birth, the card can finally use facts: a name, a weight if the family shares weights, the day, the hospital town if you know it, who the baby is said to look like and who disputes it. Use the facts the family has made public inside the family, and no others. If the grandparents told you the name in confidence before the parents announced it, the card waits. A congratulations card that breaks an announcement embargo is remembered for the embargo, not the congratulations.

My Cartmel card failed on timing as well as address. Written in March for a baby due in September, it described a room, a curtain and a welcome, all for a child whose parents had told four people the news existed. Cordelia put that card in a drawer. The replacement, written in October, was four lines long and said nothing about the room at all.

Write the name they picked, exactly as they picked it

Grandparents are the only card recipients who arrive with a name still being decided. Some have known for years what they want to be called. Some are handed a name by the first grandchild's first attempt at it, and a mispronunciation becomes permanent family law. Some are avoiding the name their own grandmother carried, for reasons that are theirs. Some couples split: one takes a traditional name gladly, the other wants their first name used until a child invents something better.

So ask, or wait, or use no grandparent name at all in the card until you know. Writing Grandma in large cheerful letters to a woman who has been quietly hoping for Nana is not a small slip. It puts your guess on paper, in a card she will keep, and it asks her to be pleased about a title she did not pick. The safe forms are easy: her own first name, both first names, or a plain 'to you both' with the congratulations doing the work. A card can be warm for six paragraphs without naming the new role once.

To Cordelia, who sewed a blue curtain in February for a grandchild she was not yet allowed to talk about. He is here, he is well, and his mother says he slept through his first night in that room. The curtain was the first thing he was given. It is still the best.

Cordelia chose DeeDee in the end, from her initials, because a neighbour's grandson had spent one summer calling her it when he could not manage Cordelia. Nobody writing to her in March could have guessed that. Two cards sent to her that spring guessed Grandma and Granny, and both guesses sit in the same drawer as mine, correct in feeling and wrong in the one word on the envelope. If a name has been chosen and announced, use it exactly, spelling included. Families are particular about Nana against Nanna, and the card is not the place to settle the spelling by personal taste.

Model cards written by the new parent

The hardest version of this card is written by the new parent, because that writer has a baby in one arm and a lifetime of being somebody's child in the other. Parents writing to their own mum or dad can say the thing nobody else can: what it was like to be raised by the people who now get to do the easier shift. Keep it to one memory, named properly, and one line about the present. Copy one of these and swap in your own kitchen, your own road, your own song.

• Mum, you read to me in the chair by the back door until I fell asleep against the arm of it, every night for about four years. Your granddaughter has the same chair now, because Dad carried it up our stairs on Saturday without being asked. Read to her badly, with the voices. She will not know the difference for years, and by then it will be too late to mind.
• Dad, you taught me to ride a bike on the lane behind the old school, running alongside with one hand under the saddle and lying about when you let go. Your grandson arrived on Sunday. He is a long way from a bike, but I wanted you to know that the hand under the saddle is the job now, and it is yours if you want it.
• To my parents, who have waited since my wedding for me to say this sentence in a card: you are grandparents. He weighed less than the Sunday joint you cooked the day we told you. Mum cried. Dad went out to the shed and came back with a tape measure, for reasons he has not explained. Both reactions were perfect.
• Mum, I understood something at three in the morning on the ward that I should have understood at seventeen. You did this, at my age, with less sleep and no help in the house, and you never once presented me with the bill. Your granddaughter is home. Come and hold her while I sleep on your sofa, the way I used to.
• For my father in law, who fixed our boiler in January, drove my wife to two appointments in February, and said nothing about either to anyone. Your granddaughter has your ears, according to the midwife, who has no reason to flatter either of you. Thank you for the winter. The rest of it we will manage in turns.
• Dad, you will notice this card says nothing about spoiling anyone or handing anyone back. You were the strict one, and the house ran on it, and I turned out able to meet a deadline. Your grandson gets the strict one too, in smaller doses. I would not have it arranged any other way.

Leave the parent's own exhaustion out of the long version of this card. A line about sleep is human. A full account of the birth, the feeding and the stitches belongs in a phone call, where the grandparents can ask questions and make the right noises in real time. On paper it takes the card over, and the grandparents end up congratulating themselves on a document about somebody else's week, again.

Model cards from a friend, a neighbour or a fellow grandparent

Friends write a different card, and theirs is often the one that gets reread, because a friend can say that the grandparents have been waiting, or hoping, or quietly not talking about it at a lunch table for three years. Family has to be tactful about the wait. A friend, who sat through the wait at the next table, does not. Keep it fond, keep it specific, and claim no share of the baby.

• DeeDee. There, I have written it first, before anyone in this street writes the other thing on an envelope. Nine months you kept that news buttoned up, sewing curtains and saying nothing at the shop. He is here now. You may talk. We have all been saving up our listening.
• To the two of you, who have driven past the school gate for thirty years on your way to somewhere else. There is a grandson in the house at the end of that road now, and from next spring you will be driving to the gate itself, slowly, with a small passenger criticising the parking. Congratulations. I have waited three years to be allowed to write this card.
• From one grandmother to a new one: the part nobody tells you is that you will think about your own mother more in the first month than in the ten years before it. It settles. What does not settle, in my experience, is the urge to buy a hat for a baby who already owns nine hats. Give in twice a year and no more.
• You told me in the queue at the bakery, in a whisper, with a loaf in each hand, that your daughter was expecting and that I was the fifth person alive who knew. I have kept that secret through a whole summer of other people's questions. Your granddaughter is announced, named and photographed. My whispering duties are over, and I am shouting about it in a card instead.
• Congratulations to my oldest friend, who at fourteen said she would never have children in the house again after her brother was born, at thirty said it again about her own, and at sixty two has cleared a bedroom, bought a cot and learnt the words to a song about a bus. People contain multitudes. Yours contains a cot.

A fellow grandparent's card carries one risk: advice wearing a congratulations costume. One short sentence of it is a gift. A paragraph turns the card into a manual. If you have more to say, say it in June, over tea, when they ask.

When it is not the first grandchild, or the news was not simple

A second or third grandchild gets a thinner post bag, and everyone in the family knows it. The first grandchild redraws the map. The third arrives into a house that already has a stair gate, a box of plastic plates and grandparents who know which cry means hunger. Write the third card as if the event were new, because for this child it is, and because the grandparents notice who bothered. Name this baby, use this baby's facts, and avoid the phrase 'another one' anywhere near the top of the card.

• Your third grandchild, and the first girl in this family in twenty eight years, arrived on Thursday to a house that thought it had finished with night feeds. She has no idea what a well run establishment she has joined. Congratulations to you both, and to her, in that order, just this once.
• For the grandparents who now have one of each: your grandson has been promoted to a position he did not apply for and cannot resign from, and your granddaughter has arrived to a grandfather already trained in hair clips. Each of them gets a different one of you. That was always the arrangement, and it still works.
• To a grandmother doing this at a distance of four hundred miles: the card cannot shorten the road, so it will not pretend to. He is named, he is well, and his parents have put a photograph of him in the frame you sent at Christmas, the one you chose for a picture you had not seen. Trains exist. So does that frame, on their mantelpiece, being looked at daily.
• After a long wait, plain words are the only safe ones. Your granddaughter is here. I know this sentence was not guaranteed, and I know you stopped saying it out loud for a while. She is here, she is yours to visit on Saturday, and I am not going to wrap the fact in anything fancier than that.

Where a family has lost a baby before, or the pregnancy followed years of treatment, the card must be built only from what the family says in public. No mention of the road unless the grandparents themselves talk about the road. No 'worth the wait', no 'good things come', no arithmetic about years. Those lines are written by people summarising a story that is not theirs to summarise. Write the arrival, the name, the grandparents' names, and stop while the card is still kind. Cordelia kept one such card from that spring in her drawer too, unopened for nineteen days, from a well meaning cousin who had written a sentence about journeys on the front of it. The envelope told her enough.

What to leave out of the card

Grandparent cards collect a set stock lines, most of them jokes about spoiling a child and handing it back, and most of them should stay in the shop. These are the ones to keep out, however often you have seen them printed:

Congratulations. Now you can fill them with sugar, teach them every bad habit, and hand them back at bedtime. That is the whole job, and do not let anyone tell you different.

Too young, surely, the pair of you. Honestly, anyone meeting you in the street will take you for the parents, and take the actual parents for something else entirely.

We expect to be invited every Sunday from now on, and we have told the others, so do not go offering the spare room to anyone else until we have had first refusal on the christening date.

If it is a girl, you must call her after your mother, it is only right, and we have mentioned it to your son, so he knows the family feeling on the matter.

Finally. We had all begun to wonder if it would ever happen, and your daughter is not getting any younger, so this really has come in the nick of time.

Three of those need a word. The handing back joke makes the grandparents' love sound conditional on a return time, and it lands badly in the many families where the grandparents will in fact be doing school runs, night cover and half the childcare. The visiting claim and the name campaign are not jokes at all in a good number of houses. They are opening bids, written down, in a card that gets kept, where they will be found again at every rereading. And the too young line, meant kindly, tells a sixty five year old that her age is the interesting fact about her week. It is not. Her grandchild is.

Leave your own advice out with the same firmness. Feeding, sleeping, schools, screens: a card has no room for a position on any of them, and a position stated in writing in week one will be quoted back, accurately, for a decade. If you are the person the family actually asks, they will ask. The card that only congratulates is the card that gets trusted.

Turn it into a group card

A new grandchild is announced to a scattered audience: the parents' friends, the grandparents' friends, old colleagues, cousins in other countries, the antenatal class, the street. Half of those people will send the grandparents a text, and a text is what it is. A group congratulations card gathers the people who watched the grandparents wait, across all that distance, into one envelope. Each signer writes the detail only they saw: the curtain sewn in February, the secret kept since the bakery queue, the spare room cleared without comment.

You can create a card online in a couple of minutes and send one link round the family chat, which is quicker than posting a paper card from house to house in the first week, when the grandparents are travelling to the baby and back and reading everything twice. A group card with multiple signers also settles the name problem in the kindest way: each person signs with the grandparent name they know the couple has chosen, or with first names alone, and nobody's early guess ends up framed on the front.

For the baby's own card, written to the parents, our congratulations on a new baby collection covers that different brief, and the guide to what to write in a baby shower thank you card handles the thank you that the parents will owe half the signers of this one. Keep the two cards apart in your head. The parents' card is about a child arriving. This one is about two people becoming somebody new.

Cordelia's blue curtain is still up. The baby is two now, walks to the window under his own power, and pulls the curtain along its rail in both directions for the pleasure of the noise, which is a small metal sound, rings on a wooden pole, that carries down her stairs and into the kitchen where she is usually standing. The curtain has a repaired tear at one corner, from the first week of this, sewn with thread that does not match. She has not replaced the thread. When I asked her why not, she said the tear is where he started, and changed the subject to lunch.