Grandma to Be Quotes: 10 Sourced Lines From Real Grandparents’ Letters and Scripture
Words My Family Quotes Editors
Americans become grandparents for the first time at 50 on average, according to AARP's Grandparents Today survey, published in April 2019. For a new grandma, that is often an age when she is still working, still busy, and not at all ready to be called "Grandma". So the best grandma to be quotes are not soft lines about rocking chairs. They are the words real first-time grandparents wrote in the week the news arrived: proud, surprised, a little funny, and already full of plans.
This page gives you 10 of those lines, each checked against the letter or text it comes from: Queen Victoria, Madame de Sévigné, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and three Bible verses. It starts with a table to match a line to the card you are writing, then a four-part method for writing the card itself, then the quotes with their stories. If you need one line right now, take Jefferson's, written about his first granddaughter: "I hope she grows lustily, enjoys good health, and will make us all, and long, happy as the centre of our common love."
Which line for which card
| Who you are writing to | Line | From |
|---|---|---|
| Your mom, telling her the news | "… happy as the centre of our common love." | Jefferson, 1791 |
| A proud new grandma | "… the birth of our first grandson!" | Queen Victoria, 1859 |
| A grandma who loves books | "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting." | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1753 |
| A grandma who will talk about the baby nonstop | "… when I talk of my grandchildren …" | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1753 |
| A grandma with a sense of humor | "She had better have resembled her mother or grandmother." | Madame de Sévigné, 1671 |
| The grandpa-to-be, gently teased | "… I bear it like a man." | Dickens, 1864 |
| A grandpa who will play on the floor | "… even Socrates might ride on a stick …" | Jefferson, 1792 |
| A baby shower card for a grandma of faith | "… let your children tell their children …" | Joel 1:3 |
| A blessing for the whole family | "… his righteousness unto children's children" | Psalm 103:17 |
| A grandma who will pass on the family stories | "… teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons" | Deuteronomy 4:9 |
How to write a card for a grandma-to-be, in four parts
A card for a future grandmother is harder than it looks, because the baby is not here yet and she is not a grandmother yet either. What works is the same four-step shape you can see in the real letters further down this page. Each step is one sentence.
- Name the change. Say it plainly: "You're going to be a grandma." Queen Victoria did the same thing in her letter: "the birth of our first grandson!" The exclamation mark is hers.
- Connect it to how she raised you. The strongest cards from a son or daughter point back: the baby is lucky because of what she already did once. This is the part only you can write.
- Add one picture of the future. Not a general wish, but one scene: her reading to the baby, teaching a recipe, telling an old family story. Jefferson imagined playing hobby-horse; Lady Mary imagined her granddaughter reading.
- Close with a quote, or a joke. A line from the table above, with the name and year under it, makes the card feel finished. A light joke works too, especially if she is not sure she feels old enough for the title.
Three examples built that way, written by our editors for this page (not quotations, so use them freely and change the details):
- From a daughter: "You're going to be a grandma. You taught me to read with your finger under every word, and I can't wait to watch you do it again, slower and with more patience than you ever had with me."
- From a son and his wife: "In May, you get a new name. Our baby is lucky: we already know exactly what kind of grandmother you'll be, because we watched what kind of mother you were."
- For a friend becoming a grandma: "Congratulations, Grandma. Fifty is the new average age for this, so you're right on time, and far too young for the rocking chair."
If the news is a surprise announcement (a card hidden in a gift, a photo of the scan), keep the card to the first step only and let her reaction do the rest. The longer message can come later, at the baby shower.
What first-time grandmothers actually wrote
The oldest grandmother letters in English print are not sentimental. They are excited, practical and quick, written by women who suddenly had someone new to worry about. Two queens of the letter form show it best.
On 27 January 1859, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, also called Victoria and known in the family as Vicky, gave birth to her first child in Berlin. Vicky was 18; the Queen was 39 and suddenly a grandmother. Six days later she wrote to her uncle, King Leopold I of the Belgians:
"I know how pleased you would be at the safety of our dear Vicky, and at the birth of our first grandson! Everything goes on so beautifully, Vicky recovering as fast and well as I did, and the dear little boy improving so much and thriving in every way."
— Queen Victoria, letter to King Leopold I of the Belgians, Buckingham Palace, 2 February 1859 (The Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, ed. A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher, 1907)
The first thing she mentions is not the baby but her daughter's safety, which is exactly what most new grandmothers feel first. The baby was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II; the editors of the 1907 edition note simply that he was "now German Emperor". None of that was known yet in 1859, which is the point: the letter is a mother relieved and a grandmother delighted, in that order. It suits a card to a grandmother whose daughter is expecting, because it honours both of them.
Almost two hundred years earlier, Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, nearly every week, and the letters became a classic of French prose. In the spring of 1671 her daughter's first child, a girl, was a few months old, and the new grandmother reported a conversation at court:
"In the midst of a silence in the circle, the queen turned to me, and asked me who my granddaughter was like? 'M. de Grignan, madam,' replied I. Upon which her majesty exclaimed, 'Indeed! I am sorry for it;' and added, in a low tone of voice, 'She had better have resembled her mother or grandmother.'"
— Madame de Sévigné, letter to Madame de Grignan, Paris, 1 April 1671 (The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Friends, ed. Sarah Josepha Hale, English translation)
The queen was Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, and the joke is at the expense of the baby's father, Sévigné's son-in-law the Comte de Grignan. Sévigné passes it on because it flatters her daughter, and herself. It is a perfect line for a grandma-to-be who is already sure the baby will take after her side of the family. Use it with a wink, and maybe not in the card that the other grandmother will read.
Funny grandma to be quotes
Every new grandmother is warned that she will bore people with photos. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the English letter writer who brought smallpox inoculation to England in the 1720s, found a worse problem. Living in Italy in the 1750s, she discovered that local officials were opening her post and assumed her long letters home must be in code. An old priest told her so to her face. Her conclusion:
"Thus I suppose my innocent epistles are severely scrutinized; and when I talk of my grandchildren, they are fancied to represent all the potentates of Europe."
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter from Italy, 1753 (in Lewis Melville, Lady Mary Wortley Montague: Her Life and Letters (1689–1762), ch. 16)
Melville prints this passage right after her letter of October 1753 to her husband, in which she complains that so many letters to and from England go missing. The joke works today for a grandmother who sends the family group chat twenty photos a day: nobody is spying on her, but everyone is reading. It makes a good caption for a "Grandma's first photo" post or a funny baby shower card. The Sévigné story above belongs in this section too, if her humor runs dry.
Lines about the grandmother she is going to be
Lady Mary's best-known grandmother letter is not a joke. In January 1753 her daughter, the Countess of Bute (wife of the future prime minister Lord Bute), wrote to say that her eldest girl, also named Mary, was good at arithmetic. The grandmother, then 63, answered with a long letter about how the child should be educated. She was pleased by the arithmetic ("the best proof of understanding") and then gave the advice that made the letter famous:
"Learning, if she has a real taste for it, will not only make her contented, but happy in it. No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to the Countess of Bute, 28 January 1753 (Selected English Letters, XV–XIX Centuries, ed. Mabel Duckitt and Harriet W. Elgee; also in Melville, ch. 15)
In 1753 it was an unusual thing to say about a girl. Lady Mary had taught herself Latin as a teenager, and she wanted her granddaughter to have the chance she had to fight for. That is the role many grandmothers take on: not a second mother, but the one who opens a door the parents are too busy to open. The second sentence is the one to borrow, written inside the cover of a first picture book for the grandma-to-be to read to the baby.
For the grandpa-to-be
The grandfather usually gets half a line in the card. These three are worth giving him a card of his own. People searching for grandpa to be quotes find the same Pinterest boards; these come from letters you can look up.
Thomas Jefferson's first grandchild, Anne Cary Randolph, was born early in 1791, while he was Secretary of State. That spring he toured Lake George and Lake Champlain with James Madison, and wrote to Anne's mother, his daughter Martha, in a little book made of birch bark (his great-granddaughter Sarah Randolph prints the letter with a note on that detail):
"I must always repeat how much I love you. Kiss the little Anne for me. I hope she grows lustily, enjoys good health, and will make us all, and long, happy as the centre of our common love."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Lake Champlain, 31 May 1791 (in Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1871)
"The centre of our common love" is one of the best descriptions of what a first grandchild does to a family: everyone suddenly has the same person to think about. It is the line to put in a card when you tell your parents together.
Seven months later, back in Philadelphia, he was still thinking about her:
"… where I may once more be happy with you, with Mr. Randolph, and dear little Anne, with whom even Socrates might ride on a stick without being ridiculous."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Philadelphia, 15 January 1792 (Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson)
Jefferson is borrowing an ancient anecdote about the philosopher playing hobby-horse with his small children: with a baby in the room, even the wisest man may look silly and nobody minds. It fits a grandpa who is serious at work and will be on the carpet within a week.
Charles Dickens took the news less gracefully, or pretended to. His first grandchild, Mary Angela, was born in 1862, when he was 50. Two years later he described the family gatherings at his house in Kent, "in which another generation begins to peep above the table", and confessed:
"I once used to think what a horrible thing it was to be a grandfather. Finding that the calamity falls upon me without my perceiving any other change in myself, I bear it like a man."
— Charles Dickens, letter to W. W. F. de Cerjat, Gad's Hill Place, 25 October 1864 (The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 2, 1880)
He was not called "Grandpa" either: Mary Angela later wrote that as a child she called him "Venerables". The quote is a gift to any grandfather-to-be who jokes that he is too young for this. Put it in his card, and expect him to read it aloud.
Bible verses for a grandma-to-be
Grandparents appear in the Bible less often than parents, and the most quoted verses (Proverbs 17:6, "Children's children are the crown of old men", and Paul's line about Timothy's grandmother Lois) are already on our thankful for grandparents quotes page, and Naomi holding her grandson (Ruth 4:16) is with our grandparents love quotes. These three speak more directly to a woman about to become one, because they are about passing something on. All are from the King James Version.
"Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons"
— Deuteronomy 4:9 (KJV)
Moses is telling the people to remember what they lived through, and to tell it to their grandchildren. For a grandmother it is a job description: she is the one who remembers. It suits a card given with a blank family-recipe book or a photo album to fill.
"But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children"
— Psalm 103:17 (KJV)
This is the verse for a blessing: the psalm promises that faithfulness is not used up in one generation. It reads well at a baby shower prayer or inside a christening card for the grandparents.
"Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation."
— Joel 1:3 (KJV)
One honest note: in Joel the "it" is a plague of locusts, a disaster the prophet wants never forgotten. Read on its own, the verse is a lovely picture of four generations passing on a story, and it is widely used that way. Just don't quote it to a pastor without expecting a smile.
Grandma-to-be sayings we could not trace
Search for grandma to be quotes and three lines turn up everywhere. They may be fine to use, but none comes with a book, a date or a letter we could check, so we have not counted them in our 10.
- "Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you're just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric." Credited to Pam Brown, a name that appears mainly in gift-book anthologies; we found no original book or date.
- "Just about the time a woman thinks her work is done, she becomes a grandmother." Credited to Edward H. Dreschnack in quotation collections, with no source given.
- "If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I'd have had them first." Usually credited to the writer Lois Wyse, but also sold as an unsigned bumper-sticker joke; we could not pin down where it first appeared.
If you want a line with a name you can trust, use the letters above. For more lines that people credit to the wrong person, see our list of misattributed family quotes.
Questions people ask about grandma to be quotes
What do you write in a card for a grandma to be?
Four short sentences: name the change ("You're going to be a grandma"), connect it to how she raised you, add one picture of the future (reading to the baby, teaching a recipe), and close with a quote or a light joke. Real letters from Queen Victoria and Thomas Jefferson follow the same shape.
What is a good quote about becoming a grandmother?
Queen Victoria's 1859 letter is one of the best real examples: "I know how pleased you would be at the safety of our dear Vicky, and at the birth of our first grandson!" For a grandmother who loves books, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting" (1753) is a fine choice.
What is a funny quote for a new grandma?
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu joked in 1753 that Italian officials opening her letters thought her grandchildren were code: "when I talk of my grandchildren, they are fancied to represent all the potentates of Europe." For the grandfather, Dickens's "I bear it like a man" (1864) is hard to beat.
What Bible verse is good for a new grandmother?
Deuteronomy 4:9 ("teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons"), Psalm 103:17 ("his righteousness unto children's children") and Joel 1:3 ("let your children tell their children") all speak about passing faith and memory to grandchildren. Proverbs 17:6 is the most familiar, but it speaks of "old men".
Once the baby arrives, the lines change. Our short grandpa quotes page has sourced lines for his first birthday card as a grandfather, and our funny grandparent quotes cover the spoiling years. If you are also writing to a sister or brother who is about to become an aunt, our aunt to be quotes are built the same way, from real letters.