Grandpa Mornings and Grandma Hobbies

Our home wi-fi went down early Monday around 1:00 am, which I know because I woke up and could not sleep-watch Downton Abbey or Gilmore Girls on my iPad, as I am wont to do in the wee hours.

And when I got out of bed a few hours later and noticed our smart bulbs were all wonky, meaning the wi-fi was still out, it didn’t matter.

Because for the first 30 to 45 minutes of my day, the internet is not necessary for me to function. My mornings are Grandpa Mornings.

What is a Grandpa Morning?

As Bree DeGroff says in her post where I first read the term:

Ultimately Grandpa Mornings are about a few things:

1. Establishing my phone works for me. I don’t work for my phone.
2. Prioritizing all the beautiful, three-dimensional things in my life before the outside world (most of which I can’t control).
3. Starting my day with a sense of ease and enjoyment, not threat detection.

For me, it’s about staying away from the digital world until I’m ready, not letting the deadlines and must-dos and oh-nos seep their way into my brain first thing.

Having a mostly analog morning routine is something I’ve been doing for about a decade, and while I keep telling myself I need to add a regular outside walk to the mix, it goes something like this:

• Wake up (usually between 6:00 and 6:30 am).
• Walk into our upstairs foyer and see two very concerned cat faces making sure I’m still alive.
• Go downstairs with the bubs and make myself coffee and a piece of almond butter toast while they howl indignantly about the interminable (15-minute) wait for their food.
• Have breakfast and read from whatever book is in my queue — currently it’s Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans, since I’m trying to get through my backlog of exhibition catalogues. But during my extreme Hamilton obsession days, there were a lot of historical biographies sitting on the dining room table.
• Feed the cats (FINALLY!!! they meow at me) and do a little kitchen zhuzhing. Fill my Yeti with water.
• Take the Yeti back upstairs to my office and meditate. Technically this involves a phone, though I do have a few offline meditations downloaded, and I keep my phone on bedtime mode — greyscale screen, no notifications visible — until 7:00 am.
• Sometimes I pull a tarot card and do a little journaling on its message, though I’ve fallen off about this lately and would like to return to it via Chelsey Pippin Mizzi’s The Shuffle.

Then, and only then, do I turn on my computer and look at any phone notifications that came in overnight.

The corollary to Grandpa Mornings are Grandma Hobbies, another term that’s been making the rounds this year. (Credit to Reddit, I believe, where I first heard this phrase?)

Grandma / Grandpa / Granny Hobbies are pretty obvious.

Again, this puts the focus on a pre-internet time when we didn’t have the option of streaming entire seasons of TV shows or entire runs of movie franchises whenever and wherever we desired. And as y’all know, I love me some quality TV couch time.

And I grew up on the original Nintendo era when we would sit around for hours and watch people beat Super Mario Bros. I couldn’t get past world 8-2 for the life of me.

But — and not to veer into tradwife territory here — I do appreciate a hobby-slash-something-to-do that doesn’t involve huge chunks of time on my phone or my computer.

Obviously ukulele is my most beloved Grandma Hobby, but I dig doing the NY Times Magazine Sunday crossword puzzle, making friendship bracelets, listening to vinyl records, and will soon be hand-painting Yetis for fun and not profit.

Earlier this year I tried cross-stitch and though it felt a bit too repetitive for my tastes, I may delve into embroidery soon. That feels like it might be a little more improvisational and less like paint-by-numbers.

If you too get on Reddit and look at others’ suggestions, you’ll find a plethora of potential ways to enjoy your time: gardening and keeping houseplants, sending snail mail, model trains, doing puzzles, knitting and crocheting, baking, fishing, birdwatching, woodworking . . . .

And if you don’t like the Grandma / Grandpa connotations here, call it Offline Time or Analog Time or whatever you want.

The whole point of all of this is to actively enjoy the time I have in my day instead of mindlessly filling it up and ticking away the minutes and hours. It’s not necessarily about quitting social media (though heck yeah, I feel so much better because I did that), but about choosing my interests rather than having them dictated to me through an algorithm.

It goes hand-in-hand with finding the magic and adventure in every day, even if (and perhaps especially if) that spark comes from something as mundane as walking to the mailbox to send a friendship bracelet to someone you love.

And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to watch an hour-long presentation on Disney neon, because I’m not entirely offline! I’m just more intentional about what I do there.