I love reading about all the variety in grandparent names and the backstories here! I knew I couldn't be the only one for whom a grandparent kit with customizable grandparent names would be helpful...
I know I gave my name in the other thread, but I go by
Amma with my five grandchildren. My husband goes by
Grandpa. The mother of his children goes by
Gigi.
My parents are
Oma and
Opa both to my stepdaughter and to my brothers' 3 girls. My stepsons were adults when I married their dad, and they didn't develop a relationship with my parents until just before they married, so they simply call them Jim & Karen. Their kids, however, all call them Oma and Opa - so they go by the same name with both the grands and great-grands.
My husband's parents go by
Grandmother and
Papaw. It's a weird combo to me, sort of poised and proper paired with down-home and country, but they each chose the grandparent name their parents went by. My husband called his maternal grandparents
Grandmother and
Granddaddy, and his paternal grandparents
Mamaw and
Papaw. They're all from Arkansas & Louisiana of French & English descent.
I called my paternal grandmother and her 2nd husband
Oma and
Opa; my paternal grandfather and his 2nd wife were
Grandpa Flinn and
Jackie (her first name, because she had children just a few years older than me and refused to be called something grandmotherly). I called my maternal grandparents
Grandmom and
Granddad. My family is of Irish, English, and Polish descent. The German influence of Oma & Opa came from the fact I was born in West Germany on my parents' first overseas military tour and my dad's stepfather was a second-generation German immigrant to the US.
One more interesting note - my dad's grandparents, who raised him from infancy to mid-elementary school, were
Nana and
Papa. (They were of Irish & English descent and lived in upstate New York.) He was very close to his Papa and desperately wanted that to be his grandfather name, but when my brother married his wife, he gained a sweet 4 year old stepdaughter who already had a grandfather she called Papa. And although Gabby was certainly old enough to be able to differentiate between the two grandfathers even if they went by the same name, my brother insisted our dad go by something different, and pushed him toward Opa instead.
So instead of being called Papa, after the man he adored, the man who raised him, he is called Opa, like his stepfather, the man who was abusive and neglectful from the time he married his mother until he escaped by joining the Army at age 17.
I want so much to scrapbook that story, but I haven't decided how much trouble it will get me in...