I hope that some of my readers have clicked on the blogroll links over to the right side of this page and are passingly familiar with some of the excellent offerings there. One of those, Super Granny, is by Sally Wendkos Olds. Who really is Super Granny, and now has a a book by the same name available for us all to add to our libraries and pass on to our children when they become grandparents themselves.

The subtitle is “Great Stuff to Do with Your Grandkids,” and it’s a regular treasure trove of ideas and projects grouped ever so usefully into age ranges and includes things even the most tech-savvy kids will find to be great fun. Don’t let on to the grandkids, but some of them are even… (gasp!)… educational!

Olds’ conversational style and well-honed writing skill makes the book eminently readable, and since it graced my mailbox my older grandchildren have taken to reading it themselves for fun ideas even when this poor old granny is too busy doing paid work to get immediately involved. They set things up and then all I have to do is join in – does that make my beloveds Super Grandkids? I think so…

Of course, as the weather warms there are enough ongoing projects out in the garden, on the ridge trails and disc golf course, or even in granny’s several major projects for the year – including a nifty solar food dryer the kids are very excited about and planning to describe for their next school years’ edification – to keep them plenty busy for the next few months. Still, they’re becoming familiar with the many great resources and hints, so I’m expecting that during the big gatherings when there are 2-5 year olds here for the teenagers to entertain they’ll be pulling out Super Granny for themselves. As if the book itself qualifies by that title for their purposes!

Again, that’s Super Granny. Get yours today!

It’s November already, the the world economic situation – or just the US economy – is dire. Many are wondering if there will be a Christmas at all this year, and that’s a shame. It means we’ve come to identify this wonderful holiday with the ugly consumer orgy it’s become over the years. Where credit cards get maxed out buying useless, cheap plastic junk or electronic gizmos that don’t last, and just about everything ends up in the landfill before next Christmas anyway.

So I’m going to advocate very strongly here for the kind of Christmas that whole families can enjoy together doing and making things that will surely become treasures to be cherished forever. Gift-giving really isn’t all about how much money you’ve got to waste, it’s about giving of one’s self and one’s thoughts and love and skills. Grandmothers are particularly adept at teaching these sort of things to the up and coming generation, and apart from some serious messes to clean up, these are wonderful projects for the holidays.

Our friends over at the blog Life on a Shoestring Budget have some very nifty ideas, a surprising number of them having to do with that ubiquitous dryer lint that mostly gets tossed these days. My favorites are dryer lint paper – for Christmas cards or handmade notebooks – dryer lint mache, and dryer lint clay. The recipes offered in links to Frugal Living and PlanetPal look to be easy and satisfying.

I really like the idea of handmade journals for budding writers and artists, kids can put so much of themselves into a project like this! My grandson learned to make leather bound journals in school, and cuts up old leather jackets and such from thrift shops and free bins to make patchwork covers. We’re just starting on the paper-making, which will probably go mostly for Christmas cards. I’ve plenty of scraps of material, lace, trim, sequins, beads, studs, jewels and buttons that can be glued on the paper to make winter or Christmas scenes. Just need good old Elmer’s and some scissors, your distant family and friends will keep these cards forever!

Check out the post at Shoestring Budget and get busy, time is slipping away! For great ideas, check out Casual Keystrokes, which has a fine list of cool journal and planner ideas. And don’t forget that the kids can also help Grandma with edible gifts. In a later post I’ll include some of my favorite cookie and candy recipes for just this purpose. If you are like me, you save all those Christmas cookie tins when the season’s over (mine are stored with the rest of the Christmas decorations). These can be filled with all sorts of yummy goodies that make great gifts. My extended family has grown so used to getting their Christmas cookie-candy assortment every year, I think they might riot if ever I were to miss a year!

The holiday season wasn’t invented to bolster free market Capitalism, you know. It’s a time for love and sharing and warmth between people. Children honestly need to know this, as the economy is very likely to be grim for the next few years, and people will be struggling hard just to survive. Teach your grandchildren how, and encourage them to enjoy. These are lessons they’ll carry forward through the rest of their lives, and will never be sorry to have learned.

Links:

Christmas in a Depressed Economy
Casual Keystrokes
‘Tis the Season: Gift Ideas
Making Paper from Dryer Lint
Lint Craft Recipes
Stuffed Toy Patterns

School’s out for the summer, the kids (and grandkids) are all looking for something to do. If you work at home, it’s a good idea to have some contingency plans or you’ll find that getting anything done is even more difficult than usual. I’m sure I’m not the only work-at-home Mom/Grandma who doesn’t get as much housework done as she’d like, even though she’s sitting right in the middle of the house 8 to 10 hours a day. Those dishes keep on piling up – especially when the rest of the family’s home. The food disappears faster than you can plan a meal, the television going constantly in the background is incredibly distracting, and then there’s the “I’m Bored!” whine that kids learn when they’re about 5 and don’t grow out of until they go off to college or career.

I’ve found some good resources on the web that offer good ideas. Char over at Weary Parent offers some great ideas in Keeping Teens and Tweens Busy This Summer. And while a few of them involve you having to physically be somewhere besides home, others serve to get the kids away from home instead! Don’t forget to read through the comments, there are more good ideas in those.

But this is Grandma’s House – I don’t have the luxury of signing the kids up for summer day camp because my house IS summer day camp! Younger children and teens who normally live in the city and swim in chlorinated backyard pools simply cannot be trusted to keep a real eye out for poisonous snakes, or check the depth of that creek swimming hole before diving in. So I do have to restrict activities to the yard itself and make all wood piles off limits, and insist that an adult or responsible older teen accompany all to the swimming hole or there’s no swimming allowed.

For my own sanity I’ve purchased a box of ear plugs that have come in useful for blocking out the television, and they also do double duty as whine-blockers too! I wish I’d had the money to get that newer, faster, more ‘loaded’ computer I think I deserve, which would have allowed me to donate this old one to the kids for computer games and basic email/surfing. Maybe next year. What I do have plenty of is art supplies – paper, paints, brushes, colored pencils, charcoals, clay, beads, colorful scraps of material, fabric paint, glues, glitter, felt and googly-eyes and jewelry findings and such. There’s always a project to be engaged, and one of the favorites is making refrigerator magnets. I get the magnet material in sheets, this can be cut into any shape.

Of course, kids and art supplies does equal a mess you’ll also have to clean up, though having the kids clean up after themselves is better. That way they know where all the supplies are, and the brushes still work because they’ve been washed. It won’t hurt them to learn some responsibility, and for those big enough to trust near the stove or a kitchen knife, letting them plan and produce some meals can be great fun.

Wendy Piersall at Sparkplug CEO offers more ideas than you can shake a stick at, in 94 Ways to Keep Kids Busy for the Work at Home Parent. It has age-appropriate resources and suggestions as well.

With a bit of planning the summertime visitors as well as out-of-school live-ins will have plenty to do to keep themselves busy while you’re working. And with just a bit more planning on the grocery end, even the younger children will be able to get their own snacks and even lunches together without making a big mess or interrupting your train of thought. So check out these resources and see if there aren’t some creative ways for you to maintain your own sanity while still being everybody’s favorite summer place!

Links:

Bored.com: Kids Links
Keeping Teens and Tweens Busy This Summer
94 Ways to Keep Kids Busy for the Work at Home Parent
Printable Games A to Z
Free Stuff For Kids

Ever since I got married relatives have been sending their kids to visit during the summer when they’re out of school. First it was my little brother and sisters. When they grew up and had children, it’s been nieces and nephews too. Then it was adopted children, semi-adopted children and then their children – my grandkids. Since I’ve generally been a mostly at-home Mom and Grandma, this (wherever we’re living at the time is ‘this’) is where the kids come. We don’t mind.

Yet the visitors are mostly “city kids,” who aren’t trained and accustomed to looking out for issues here in the country that simply don’t arise in the city. Looking both ways before crossing the street, knowing how to trigger the crossing light, being wary of strangers, keeping the doors and windows locked and being in constant cell-phone distance from a parent or caregiver are all very useful skills in the city. Out here where the nearest paved road is half a mile away and nobody can “drive by” there’s other things to worry about.

The grandson who has lived here with us for 16 of his 18 years has never run into serious trouble. Grandson #2 and nephew #1 from baby sister have both had losing run-ins with copperheads, another nephew nearly broke his ankle trying to run straight down the terraces (but at least he didn’t take a nose-dive off the cliff), and we’ve installed a stop sign at the railroad crossing because we’ve always been paranoid of that. Only a few visitors ever got really lost, luckily we have very good girl-dogs who will always tell us if a kid’s in trouble, lead us right to them.

So we’ve installed some activities that will keep visiting kids close and entertained. We can’t move the swimming hole any closer (it’s about a mile), so we insist that an elder teen or adult ALWAYS accompany the young’uns – swimming hole totally off-limits until someone becomes available. We’ve also closed off the bottomland to kids, enforce it with horror stories about campers who had to go to the hospital with total-body poison ivy, whole families attacked by swarms of yellow jackets. Copperheads and timber rattlers. Even the ghosts of the prisoners who built the railroad’s great wall across the cove. You name it, we’ve tried it. Now nobody goes down there in the summer unless we make ‘em help clean out the spring.

We’ve got 10 holes of frisbee disc golf course right here on the ridge. Nephew did manage to break a total of 6 kitchen and library windows when learning how, but we’ll get those replaced eventually. With plexiglass. There are occasional snakes, but generally people playing are making enough noise for them to get out of the way. Plus, the little girl-dogs are on constant patrol, take kid-duty seriously.

We have horseshoes and badminton, a large and always in need of help garden that grows delicacies that never actually make it back to the kitchen before getting eaten. There’s the back yard campfire pit and the forest is chock full of sticks to burn. This year we’ve stocked up on boxes of Peeps, on sale the week after Easter and chunked into the freezer. If you love roasted marshmallows, you’ve just gotta try roasted Peeps!

We have a regular armory stuffed with the entire range of water weapons, from derringer to tactical nuke. Plus several gross of balloons for making grenades. We have an archery and BB range. We have an entire array of mock battle gear, your basic wooden and PVC spears and swords and battle axes and clubs covered with pipe foam and duct tape so nobody can get really hurt. And, for when worst comes to worst, we’ve got a well-stocked library room, every board game ever invented, some challenging jigsaw puzzles, cards, not one but two bar-quality dart boards and a box full of darts. We’ve a junk drawer full of dice and pick-up sticks, a DVD/VCR, and art/craft supplies galore. Daughter works at a supply store…

We also keep large supplies of mosquito repellant on hand. There’s the deep woods DEET stuff (use sparingly, it causes cancer eventually even though it prevents West Nile and Yellow Fever right now), there’s Avon Skin-So-Soft, and there’s a mint-based concoction I make and put in a mister spray jar. Here in the Appalachian forest, bug repellant is a lot more useful than sun screen (but we keep SPF 30+ in big bottles).

For the inevitable stings, bites, cuts, bends, scrapes and pokes, I stock poundage of baking soda and jars of ammonia and rubbing alcohol, industrial-size containers of your basic no-frills bandaids and bandages, 4 sizes of ace elastic bandages, some elastic joint supporters and some velcro splints.

Being well stocked and well prepared for summertime guests of the “I’m Bored!” variety is a temper-saver extraordinaire. We’ve always had to lay down some hard and fast rules for when other people’s children are here for any length of time, but that doesn’t prevent the inevitable.

What kind of supplies do readers suggest for guests in-town? Things have changed a lot since I was a kid and my parents didn’t want to know I was around unless it’s dinnertime and I’m late. The rainy weather indoor stuff would be as good, I think. Lots of scrap paper, colored pencils, waterpaints, charcoals, beads and beading supplies, various other art/crafty things, video and DVD entertainment options, board games, cards, darts, dice, etc. What do you do with kids if they can’t go outside, apart from formal activities you’ve planned for evenings and days-out (movies, out to dinner, trip to the museum, picnics, hiking excursions, swimming at the pool or lake, etc.)?

Back in our younger days when we lived in Florida and had to entertain crowds of friends and relatives at Christmas, we used to rent an oceanfront condo for the week. We’d decorate the condo instead of the house, and have our Christmas there. Not being a big fan of doing a lot of actual decorating myself (if I had my d’ruthers all I’d have are pegs on the wall and bare furniture), and given the fact that as clown-elves we were usually working exhausting mall shifts right through Christmas Eve, this worked out fine for me.

Working at malls isn’t the same thing as shopping at malls. Which I never do, because everything at the mall costs three times what it’s worth so that mall shops can pay rent on the high-dollar property and hire expensive entertainers like us to bring in the crowds. I’ve always been of the strong opinion that elves should be able to postpone Christmas until New Year’s without suffering any ‘spirit’ penalties (and coincidentally cashing in on all the after-Christmas sales when everything costs half or less of what it cost the day before Christmas). But of course it’s never actually works out that way.

Then 15 years ago our son died, our business (he was a partner) collapsed, and we moved our broken hearts to a small mountain cabin to mend and figure out a way to start over. Our daughter and her 2-year old son moved with us, and we’ve been here ever since (and we adopted a few along the way). Until this year we’ve always decorated the cabin – it’s definitely made for Christmas! – even if we were planning to be elsewhere for the actual holidays.

Well, I probably shouldn’t say “we.” Elder daughter is the decorator in this family, and she’s nothing like me. She’s a regular pack rat about ‘stuff’, a dedicated thrifter and recycler with honest-to-gosh mounds of ‘stuff’ I’d have tossed years ago, and collects dust-catchers obsessively. She’s also a Christmas nut. She removes all the everyday dust-catchers on the shelves and mantle and walls, replaces them with an even bigger collection of Christmas dust-catchers. She has dozens of ceramic, plastic, resin and wax Santas. She has dozens of angels too, and both these collections come in black and white (ethnically speaking).

She has Christmas candle holders and Christmas candles and Christmas artwork for the walls. She even tapes Christmas hats on the collection of school picture 8x10s of our grandson. We’ve more Christmas ornaments than can be hung on the 15-foot tree that usually graces our cathedral ceiling living room. So she hangs ornaments on the fake evergreen garland complete with mass amounts of white lights that drapes the stairway to the loft, the mantle, the double doors to the deck, the windows, the kitchen beams, the front deck rail, the eaves of the roof, and the stairs to the basement.

She has Christmas curtains, Christmas rugs, Christmas throws, Christmas cushions, Christmas coffee cups, Christmas cutting boards, Christmas dishes, Christmas salt and pepper shakers, Christmas serving bowls, Christmas shot glasses and Christmas tablecloths. This little cabin turns into a regular Pigeon Forge-style All Christmas All The Time shop for three weeks a year, and I must admit that since I don’t have to do the heavy lifting, I’ve grown quite accustomed to it. Even fond, if missing it this year is any indication.

But my baby sister wrote a couple of months ago that she wanted to come with her husband and three children to spend Christmas this year with us. Which I certainly couldn’t refuse, since we lost a sister this past spring and family is important. The daughter of the sister we lost is also coming for Christmas with her fiance, younger daughter and her husband may come from Indiana, and we’ve friends from West Virginia and Cleveland who will be here the day after Christmas on their way to Florida. There simply isn’t enough floor space or padding in my 28′x28′ cabin to put that many people up, and it’s too cold to make them all pitch tents in the yard.

So I arranged to borrow our older sister’s new log McMansion in a gated resort community on a lake just south of here. She and her husband are out of the country for two more years, we’re the caretakers, and their retirement home has a lot more floor space (plus 4 bedrooms and 3 baths) than I’ve got. Thus my elder daughter has been packing all our collected Christmas stuff into her car and taking it to the McMansion. She’s very excited to decorate (it’ll be gorgeous, I’ve no doubt) and get photos for her portfolio. And this sort of thing could be a real money-maker for her one of these days. She is very good at it, given that theater tech is her degree and that’s all about sets and stage dressing.

Plus the McMansion’s got big, really cool brand new appliances – including fancy ones – plus a real dining table and a stone-top L-shaped island/bar that can easily serve 30. Christmas dinner will be wonderful, we’ll film us all around the 20-foot tree singing carols and beam it overseas so big sister can see, we’ll have lots of presents and lots of music and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” every 6 hours or so, and have a truly memorable Christmas.

Meanwhile, my cabin looks just like it always does. Drab and overly dusty, not a hint of Christmas. Sure, we’ll have to come back every day (it’s only 17 miles) to feed the critters, and when the northern visitors come we’ll have to come back for the annual Kudzu Open disc golf championship.

Ah, well. I’ll just remember that we used to have Christmas somewhere else every year, so doing it again isn’t a big deal. When it’s over I’ll post some pictures of how the decorating turned out. It’s never too early to start obsessively collecting Christmas stuff for next year (while it’s on half-price sale!).

Many, many moons ago when my children were actually little children (and we were quite poor), we all learned how much our extended family and friends loved to get presents from us that we’d made ourselves, however imperfect they might be. Because they represent some real thought, some hard work, and each comes with a little bit of ourselves mixed in.

That first year I’d decided that there would be no ornaments on our tree that we didn’t make. Got some construction paper, glue and glitter, and went to work. Daughter made some nice round ornaments with patterns of bright glitter on both sides that nicely reflected the lights. Son decided cutting glittered rounds into spirals worked nicely, and they certainly did! They hang with depth a little like icicles, but with personality. Then the next year they got together and made many more glittered paper ornaments with the names of loved ones written in puffy paint on top of the glitter, “so they can be here with us for Christmas,” my son explained. We still have a surprising number of these paper and glitter ornaments, and hang them still, every Christmas.

As presents for others we started with some simple candlemaking, a kit with wax, dye and some plastic molds that I bought on sale. The kids made some extremely ugly monkey-face candles that my Mother-in-Law still cherishes. She’s never lit them, they come out for display every Christmas in her home. We still make all our own Christmas cards out of basic scrapbooking supplies and recycled cards from years before, and all the grandchildren started out making their own holiday gifts and decorations with whatever’s on hand. Someday I might collect all the great kid-ideas and write a craft book, since most of those type of books are written by Martha Stewart types instead of kids who have The Best Ideas On The Planet.

If you’ve got children old enough to wield a pair of scissors and use an Easy-Bake oven, there are some very good craft ideas out on the web this time of year that you might want to try. It’s good quality time to spend with your children, a fine mess to be made (and cleaned up) by all, and lots of laughs! It can become a tradition at your home too, and it honestly does impart a different sort of view of the “holy days” than what they get from television or the mayhem at the mall.

Deborah over at Simply Thrifty blog has a list of 50 Holiday Things You Can Make Yourself that has links to instructions for all 50 items. These include a wreath, an evergreen garland, greeting cards, popcorn and cranberry chains, a Menorah, a dreidle, traditional Kwanzaa decorations, and a bunch of good cookies, cake and candy your kids can help you whip up. Pine cone ornaments, stockings, bath salts and potpourri – there’s something here for every level of skill and every age range.

So if you’re sick of the consumerist frenzy and ‘Bah, Humbug!’ mood of what should be a joyful holiday season, set some time aside for your family. Amass some paper, glitter, old cards, toothpicks, felt and glue and get busy! You’ll never be sorry, and your children will learn something valuable about holidays and about their own abilities which will only be reinforced tenfold when the recipients of their gifts let them know how truly appreciated they are!

Links:

50 Holiday Things You Can Make Yourself

The Garden Granny [Holiday Food Gifts]

Discount Craft Supplies

Anything Crafts

1001 Full-Size Patterns, Projects & Ideas

365 Easy Projects for Every Occasion