This Grandparents’ Day piece appeared as a guest post over at Grandma Ideas.  You can visit that blog here: http://grandmaideas.com/strengthening-relationships-with-grandchildren-document-your-time-together

Making cut and paste board books is quite easy and provides hours of enjoyment for your grandchild and parents.

Building Memories

As grandparents, we play many important roles in our extended families.  At the foundation, we can provide the important elements of security, acceptance and love.   We can do that even if we are not able to have daily or weekly contact with our children or grandchildren.  We do it by being constant and consistent, showing by our actions that we will listen when they talk. We do it by loving unconditionally.

Grandparents also provide a bridge between the past and the present.  Because we have lived a long life, we understand the value of both memories and dreams.  These two elements can provide the insight and vision that leads youngsters to follow in the footsteps of those who went before, and to guide the ones coming behind.

You can help your grandchildren build memories by spending quality time with them.  And even if you live all the way across the country, or the world, you can help strengthen those memories, and your relationships, by documenting the times you do have together.

An easy and enjoyable way to do this by creating a scrapbook filled with photographs, playbills, musical compositions, drawings, or paintings, whatever trigger memories of enjoyable times spent together.  At first you may have to collect or create these documents yourself, but share what you are doing with your grandchildren.  As they begin to understand the value of their own memories,, they will naturally begin to suggest activities to document, photos and crafts to include, and even to collect pamphlets, maps, and other souvenirs from places you visit to “put in our book.”  As they learn to write, they can help with captions, journal entries, and stories, and the creation of a book can become an activity in itself, producing years of memories for all of you.

Documenting Memories in Picture Books

I began by creating very simple picture books for my granddaughter.  From her earliest months I took  photos whenever we were together, then sifted through them with her as she approached her first birthday. Together we identified her favorite photos, and I produced something sturdy that she could look at over and over.

The first book was  a collection of photos of family members and close friends, with their names below their picture.  By paging through the book with me or her parents, Bean soon learned the names of aunts and uncles, grandparents and friends, and thus began to understand the broad and strong roots of her family.  I titled that first book My Important People Book. 

The second volume recorded the first year I cared for Bean while her mother worked, and was titled  A Year at Grandma’s House.  I originally conceived of it as a way to keep my daughter appraised of what we were doing each week – kind of like the status reports I used to write for work.  But in the long run, it was Bean who took the book out week after week and replayed the fun we had been having together.

The first few years, I used blank board books, adhering photos and very short captions with rubber cement, or using Avery label stock that fit the 5 x 6 pages in the book. I bought the books online from Blank Slate Board Books, which provided templates and sticky paper stock and telephone help if you had trouble printing the photos where you wanted them on the page.  Older children may enjoy writing and/or illuminating such books for their younger brothers and sisters, using markers, stickers, etc.

Make a customized alphabet book with pictures of you and your grandchild

More recently I discovered a source of blank books that are a little less expensive, and they also will take your photos and lay out the whole book for you and print it, resulting in a professional product.  Pint Size Books offers several attractive templates, including Welcome, Happy Birthday and ABCs. The last one is my favorite — you can customize the alphabet with personal photos, and place your grandchild’s name and photo on the cover.

You can also purchase blank books from Amazon.com.

Professional looking books for older children can be made through a variety of online services, including Apple’s iBook, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and can be ordered at some brick-and-mortar retailers.

I hope you’ll try my ideas, and let me know how they work for you.

I love comments!  To continue this conversation leave a comment by clicking on the link below.