My 5 year old daughter is obsessed with her grandparents. Especially my mom. My mom is always buying her things and giving her surprises when we visit. I have tried to ask her not to but that’s never going to happen. She buys her stuff but won’t really pay attention to her if we are visiting for more than a few hours. My daughter wants to play 24/7. She’s our only kid and only grandkid at the moment so when we get together she’s very clingy to my mom and I see it annoys her. She wants constant attention and my mom gives in until she’s had enough and just tells her no in a nice way basically. I feel bad because she does not do this with my husband and i but my mom somehow always makes us feel like it’s our fault. She’s a well behaved child she just sees my mom as a play friend more than an adult figure like me. My mom never says no and makes me the bad guy for intervening. I hate it. Today it really got to me. We had to stay overnight at my parents due to power outage from this ice storm. I waited as long as possible to head over there yesterday because I just knew it was more of an inconvenience to my parents. So we got there after dinner and of course my mom had something to give my daughter. That just got her all riled up at bedtime. So I let her stay up and get her energy and excitement out. This morning my daughter wakes up and we didn’t know because she went straight to my parents room. Normal for her when she stays there and I knew this was going to happen so I set an alarm but she still got up way earlier than usual. I even told my parents to send her to us if she came in there and we’d handle it. My mom instead made her breakfast and after a while made my daughter come wake us up. Now this was still early and my alarm was still set. My mom made the comment she doesn’t baby sit before 8am. We apologized and tried to say we obviously didn’t know she was up. Well the comments kept coming. My daughter wanted to change the tv to cartoons and we had to tell her no a few times and told her this is like our house no TV in the morning. My mom just hands the remote over in an abrupt way and says she’s going to shower anyway. After she came back my kid was excited all over again and my mom asks if she usually is so hyper and talkative in the mornings like this. I had it. I said she’s 5 and you had 3 kids so you should know the answer. We will be gone in 30 mins if you can bare it. We left around 10am so they could go about their day. We all were off work anyway so I thought it would be more fun to hangout but my mom was just acting like we were a nuisance.

I’m still so upset and annoyed. What can I do with my daughter to make our visits enjoyable and not make them feel obligated to entertain her. Most of it stems from my mom own behavior that she doesn’t say no and gives in when I’m a strict mom. My daughter behaves until she is over there for a while.