20 ways grandparents can model a healthy relationship

My husband and I celebrated our thirty-second First Kiss Anniversary on Sunday. Yes, thirty-two years ago, PawDad and I smooched for the very first time, sealing forever our fate as parents, grandparents and more.

We've always marked the day in a small but special way. This year it was simply skipping church to go out to breakfast together.

In light of our celebration, I considered that one of the best things grandparents can do for grandchildren — and parents can do for their children, regardless of the child's age — is to model a positive personal relationship with their partners.

How can grandmothers do that, though, when time with grandkids is typically focused on the kids?

Here are 20 ways you can do both — be a fun and interesting grandma to the kids while nurturing your relationship with their grandpa. At the same time. Together.

1. Make breakfast together — Grandma, Grandpa and the grandkids.

2. Play an outdoor game that requires teams — Grandma and Grandpa on one team, grandkids on another.

3. Play a board game using the same team approach.

4. Take a family bike ride.

5. Spread a blanket in the yard for some night-time stargazing as a family.

6. Wear matching No. 1 Grandpa and No. 1 Grandma T-shirts on the same day. (Okay, I must admit that this one might make me — and Jim ... and our adult kids — gag. But some grandparents do get into this. Which is cute.)

7. Hold hands while taking a walk around the block — or through the mall — with the grandkids.

8. Play Wii games together.

9. Go ice skating.

10. Or roller skating.

11. Have a dance party in the living room, playing songs you enjoyed when first dating. Don't hold back on showing the kids your best dance moves.

12. Create a video together to email or text to long-distance grandchildren.

13. Roast marshmallows by the outdoor fire pit or indoor fireplace.

14. Perform a musical number for the kids, playing instruments, singing or both. Kids love performing for Grandma and Grandpa; this gives them a turn at being in the audience.

15. Take a break from pushing swings and such at the park to hang out together on a blanket while the kids play.

16. Share photo albums from the early years.

17. Better yet, share your wedding album.

18. And if it's your thing, take the kids to church with you…and sit by Grandpa.

19. Have a movie night featuring Grandma and Grandpa’s favorite movie — and your favorite movie snacks.

20. Create a fort for the grandkids then surprise them when they arrive.

Today's question:

What memories do you have of your grandparents expressing love for each other?

Gizmos and gadgets: Impress grandkids with how things used to work

Take a look around the library or a bookstore and you'll see there's no shortage of books based on the theme of “How Things Work.” Such books, most often written for elementary age kids, explain — and sometimes show with brilliant illustrations — how science, the body, our government, and everyday gizmos and gadgets of a dazzling array work.

Those types of books are always fun to peruse with grandchildren. While they learn how things work, we grandparents get to see how our grandchildren's minds and imaginations work.

Even more fun, though, is showing grandkids how things really work. More accurately, showing them how things really used to work, things that you — and possibly your children, parents of the grandchildren — once upon a time used on a regular basis.

In fact, grandparents may have what may seem to some an outdated home, yet to a grandchild, Grandma and Grandpa's house could serve as the ultimate museum on just how things used to work.

Take telephones. Some of us still have rotary phones. I do. I don’t use it, as I’ve gone high-tech with an iPhone and no longer even have land-line service. I do, though, still have that old rotary phone around, a style of phone my oldest grandson has likely never seen and surely has never used.

Next time my grandsons visit my house, I'm going to pull out that old rotary phone and show them both how telephoning friends and loved ones used to work.

Consider music, too. My oldest grandson is used to accessing Mom's and Dad’s smartphones, iPads, iPods, computers and even the television music channels for listening to music. Some days my daughter does go old school with my grandsons and plays — gasp! — CDs. But records? I'm pretty sure my grandsons have never seen a record, never heard a record.

Well, I have records. Albums and 45s. And I have a record player. I even have records that I used to play on that very same record player for my daughters to dance to, sing to at the top of their lungs. Next time my grandsons visit my house, I plan to play a few records for us all to sing and dance around to together, the way enjoying music used to work.

Maybe we'll even bust out the cassette player and cassettes for a real party atmosphere! Yes, we still have them.

Cameras are another biggie, another gadget most of us have on hand — and not just on our smartphones. One of my hobbies is taking photos, and I’ve taken literally thousands of photos of my grandsons in the four-plus years I’ve been a grandma. All have been taken with a digital camera. I do, though, still have a camera that requires film, results in photos and negatives.

I can just imagine how intrigued my grandsons will be when I buy a roll of film — they do still sell it, don’t they? — and load it into my old camera, then click-and-advance to show them how photos were taken in the old days. (Of course, the oohing and aahing will have to wait until I get those photos developed. They do still have one-hour photo centers, don't they?)

Now if only I still had that 110 Instamatic from my early years of photo taking, just after shelving the Polaroid camera. Even my daughters might be impressed with my old 110 camera and its film cartridges, my weapon of choice when my girls were wee babes.

The ideas for sharing with a grandchild how things used to work are endless once you consider the changes in just the past few decades to all things electronic.

Think televisions. Turning a dial to change channels? How bizarre that might seem to a child used to using a remote.

Or typewriters versus computer keyboards … and iPads.

What about transistor radios versus Pandora on iPhones or iPads?

And the one we all lovingly remember, possibly still have: crank-style ice-cream makers. The ones you (or your own mom or dad) had to pack with salt then all the kids took turns cranking and cranking until the creamy goodness was ready.

Pretty amazing gadgets we grandparents once used, if you think about it. More impressive are the Jetson-like advances in just our short — yes, short — lifetimes. Imagine the jaw-dropping advances our grandkids will see in their hopefully long lifetimes.

So take a look around your home. One need not be a hoarder to have all the equipment on hand for entertaining — and educating — a grandchild for hours.

And when you run out of ideas, simply consult your encyclopedia. Not the one you access online, but the one on your bookshelf. You do still have one, right? I thought so, for we grandparents know printed encyclopedias are the way accumulating knowledge used to work.

Every once in a while those old encyclopedia volumes still work, at least when it comes to entertaining a grandchild with our antique accumulations. Plus, they work in grand ways for pressing leaves and flowers inside the pages, too — something newfangled online reference sites will never be able to do.

photos: stock.xchng

Today's question:

What are some of the outdated gizmos and gadgets you still own? (And, no, your spouse doesn't count!)

How to tell grandkids 'I love you' in another language

I tell my grandsons I love you a lot. Returning the sentiment to those who say it to them was one of the first phrases they learned, though it did sound a bit like a foreign language at first, one only family members understood. Phonetic translation of Mac’s first utterance of it: Wuh woo!

Such I love yous in a language foreign to all but family members can become a shared sweetness, carried on through the years. But have you ever said I love you in Finnish? Swahili? Russian? Or even Spanish, for those of you who—like me—have not even the most basic of foreign language skills?

While I love you sounds the very same in some languages—think Malaysian and Maltese—there’s a whole world of ways it can be pronounced in other languages. The great thing is, you don’t need to know another language in order to learn how to say sweet somethings to your grandchildren (and others) in more ways than one, thanks to the Translate application from Google.

In the Google Translate app, simply type in a word or phrase you want to translate to another language, choose the language you’d like to convert it to, and hit enter. You then not only see how it is written, you have the ability (in most languages) to hear it pronounced.

Here are a few examples of I love you in various languages:

Swahili — Nakupenda

Dutch — Ik hou van je

Afrikaans — Ek is lief vir jou

Latin — Te amo

Czech — Miluji tě

Vietnamese — Tôi yêu các bạn

French — Je t'aime

German — Ich liebe dich

Filipino — Mahal kita

Irish — Is breá liom tú

Choose from one of those or perhaps one that’s part of your family heritage. Better yet, visit Google Translate with your grandchild to choose another. The phrase you choose and learn can then be your special love language, at least when it comes to saying I love you.

You also can type in a phrase you typically say to your grandchildren—such as the one I often say to my grandsons to make them giggle: Grandma loves you soooooo much!—and find another language in which to say it. It’s a great way to create a special code word or phrase just for you and your loved ones to share throughout the years.

My special phrase for my two grandsons in Swahili? Grandma anakupenda sana! And I do. Soooooo much!

Happy Valentine's Day! Or as they say in Azerbaijani: MüqəddəsValentin günü!

Today's question:

What special twist do you put on your I love yous, to kids or other loved ones?

Ivory Soap + microwave + kids = unexpected fun

More than six months ago, I pinned this interesting pin on Pinterest, figuring I'd one day try it with my grandsons—crafting with Ivory soap that had been heated in the microwave. It may sound odd, but it looked like good, clean (plus cheap and easy) fun.

I decided we'd finally give it a shot during my recent stay with Bubby and Mac, so I packed several bars of Ivory Soap for the trip. I was right about it being good, cheap, easy fun. The clean? Well, surprising as it may seem, this was one of the messier projects I'd done with the boys. More on that later, though, after you see how much fun we had, regardless of the mess.

What you need:

• One bar of Ivory Soap

• A microwave

• A smidgen of water

• Cookie cutters (optional)

What you do:

Unwrap the bar of soap and place on as large a microwavable platter or paper plate as will fit in your microwave.

Put the plate with soap in the microwave, turn the timer to about 5 minutes (knowing you'll likely stop it before time's up), hit Start, then watch the magic!

The bar of soap will expand and puff up into a nearly basketball-sized chunk of fun. As it gets bigger and bigger, stop the microwave as the soap becomes large enough to soon touch the walls or top of the microwave interior. (This is about 3-5 minutes, depending on your microwave.)

Using hot pads, remove the soap from the microwave. It will be hot but cools quickly.

Allow the kids to marvel at it.

Once the soap has cooled completely (beware the center as unpuffed remains of the bar of soap will be hot), have the kids tear it into pieces and place in a large bowl.

Add a small amount of water—about 1/8 cup, a little at a time—then mix and mix and mix with a wooden spoon until the chunks are relatively smooth and about the consistency of Play-Doh.

Divide the mixture between the kids (I put it on paper plates in hopes of containing the mess). Let them have at it, enjoying the texture and shaping as desired.

Bubby loved the soapy surprise:

Mac loved it, too (though I did have to make sure he didn't taste it):

Pressing the mixture into cookie cutters is an option, too, one we opted for the second time we did this, when we just had to show Mommy and Daddy how cool it was.

Whether made free form or pressed into cookie cutters, let the shapes dry and harden for about a day. Once hard and dry, they provide another round of fun at bath time.

As I mentioned at the outset, you may think this would be a clean project, considering it's just soap. It is...until you start breaking the chunk of soap apart and it flakes and creates white soap specks everywhere.

The first time I did this with my grandsons, it was a pretty big mess. Washing up the soap flakes turned them into lathery streaks that took several washings. Plus, spots the boys touched were marked with hard chunks of soap—chair backs, their clothes, even Mac's ear that he had scratched mid-molding.

The second time we did this, though, I was more determined to contain the flakes and powder from the soap. It made for a cheap, easy, relatively clean, and unexpectedly good time.

This post linked to Grandparents Say It Saturday.

Today's question:

What did you most recently use your microwave for?

Easy homemade suckers

Once upon a time, I pinned on Pinterest a pin for making homemade suckers using Jolly Rancher candies. When you clicked on that pin, it didn't lead to the actual directions (as I've found the case to be with many a Pinterest pin), but the photos made it seem simple enough that further directions weren't necesary.

The photos also made it seem like a sweet and simple project Bubby would enjoy. So we tried it.

Bubby and Mac both enjoyed it. Well, Mac mostly sampled the Jolly Ranchers while Bubby and I did the work. Here are the directions—which will be here for a long time to come, just in case you choose to pin them on Pinterest for returning to later.

What you need:

• Jolly Rancher hard candies

• sucker sticks

• parchment paper

What you do:

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place candies in sets of three in spots on the parchment paper that will allow for a sucker stick to extend from the candy grouping once candies are melted in the oven.

Bake for about 5 minutes or until the candies are melted.

Remove from oven and immediately press sucker sticks into each candy puddle.

Cool completely and remove from parchment paper.

Two notes: 1. Use parchment paper, not wax paper for lining the baking sheet. I used wax paper and much of it stuck to the suckers. Then I made a smaller batch using parchment paper and the suckers came off the paper beautifully. 2. Bubby and I decided three Jolly Ranchers per sucker made for a large-size sucker requiring lots of sucking, so we plan to use only two Jolly Ranchers per sucker going forward.

Today's question:

What is your favorite candy?