grandchildren: more than a refrigerator magnet

Grandchildren are an underutilized source of embarrassing but critical information pertaining to personal hygiene and grooming. Grandchildren will give you information your partner or best friend can't or won't. Always, always thank them for the feedback. If it sends you to the bathroom to sob into the towels, thank them anyway.

Take hair for instance. The grandchild is a safeguard against continuing, in ignorance, a bad hair choice. If one asks you, "What's that on your hair?" you may reasonably assume that the color choice was unfortunate. Or unaware, you may be out and about with bird poop in your hair. Sometimes clarification is necessary.

If the color choice is good, the child will say, "Did you cut your hair?" When you hear the phrase,"Did you cut your hair?" you can confidently assume that you've made a good hair choice even if cutting your hair wasn't one of the choices.

If you hear "I can see your head", that means get to nearest mirror and make an adjustment to your comb over.

If they fall over laughing when you walk in, make a quick, graceful exit, leave town, and remain away until whatever you've done resolves itself.

Next up, tooth checking. As we age the enamel erodes leaving our tooth surfaces rough. You may have addressed this by having all your teeth are capped. If so, skip this part and go admire your new porcelain. You don't need a trained tooth checker.

For the rest of us, eroding enamel means that food bits don't slide away as easily as they once did. This is where a grandchild is useful as long as the child is verbal

Unlike hair analysis, tooth checking requires training.

1. Discourage the child from using such words as gross, gag, yuk and ooooh look at this! during a tooth check.
2. Teach them the skill of quick, inconspicuous checks throughout the meal. Otherwise a lovely evening will end with a shout of "tooth check" and they all bare their teeth and expect you to do the same.
3. Define the desired reaction to seeing a bit of food hanging in your teeth. I've had some success with a gesture. If a designated checker sees an offending bit, he points to the location in his own mouth. This takes practice. They rarely point at the corresponding tooth and if they do, it's a mirror image. This requires practice on your part as well.

Tooth checking is built on trust. If you aren't sure your grandchild would sacrifice an hour of allotted computer time for you, best not engage that one as your tooth checker lest you be sent out into the world with a black bean skin anchored to your left incisor.

I recommend assigning tooth checking to the older children, certainly no younger than eight. Any younger and finesse is not their strong suit. They are still learning not to fart at the table.

And now, dare I say it, nose monitoring. Other than offensive body odor, the silent-but-deadlies, nose issues are so taboo that your best friend will send you in all your mother-of-the-bride glory down the aisle without saying a word, and never bat an eye.

Children on the other hand find nose probing endlessly fascinating, and they can't understand why you don't as well. Don't try to explain it; you'll lose their respect.

The smaller children are the most effective spotters. Being short, when they look up at you they have the best line of sight. If there's a problem, the code is:  There's a bat in the cave.

One Sunday morning I'm making nice in the parish hall when one of the small ones comes streaking over, grabs me by the knees, looks up, cocks her curly little head and says, "Why Grammy, you's gots a bat in your cave."

Close enough.