Grammy Tanda and I are celebrating our 33 1/3 year anniversary this weekend! That’s a third of a century! She is a wonderful lady. It’s been a fun adventure so far!

Shayne and Tanda Wedding March 12, 1976

We are blessed with 5 children and 8 grandchildren.

- Grandpa Shayne

Grammy Tanda and I are going to be featured on StoryOfMyLife.com this week. My story will be published Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 2009, and Tanda’s will be on Thursday, the 5th. Our featured stories were written by a professional storyteller, Sarah Peppel, whose own story you can read at the Story of My Life website.

We are incredibly honored to be featured by Story of My Life. It is an amazing website. They are doing wonderful things. I am finishing writing a review of the site, and will be posting it Wednesday. Stay tuned…

- Shayne

[Update: You can read my Story of My Life website review here. It also has the links to our stories on their website.]

I love discovering new technologies that I can use as a grandparent. Don’t you? Especially when they are free! For example, I recently discovered this awesome new website where you can create your own online digital scrapbooks for free! It’s called scrapblog.com. As soon as you’ve read my review and seen my example scrapblogs, I’m sure you’ll be eager to surf over to scrapblog.com and play with it!

My first scrapblog

Take a look at this first scrapbook I made there. It’s simple; just two pages. It only took me about 20 minutes to complete it. That shows how intuitive the software is. These are photos of our 8th grandchild, baby Isabella on her birth day.

Click on the play button to it play it with music, or click the forward or back buttons.

Scrapbooking is one of the leading folk arts in the US today. Digital scrapbooking is creating a scrapbook using a computer. 

Scrapblog Builder is scrapblog.com’s web-based application for creating digital scrapbooks. It has an intuitive interface that is very easy to learn. This online tool has plenty of features to help you get started quickly. It comes with a generous set of free themes which include backgrounds, stickers, shapes and frames. You upload your own photos for adding to your scrapblogs. You drag-and-drop each of these elements onto your scrapbook page. You can design simple scrapblogs (such as the one above), or multimedia rich scrapblogs including music and video.

The Scrapblog Builder is an amazing example of what can be created with the latest web development software. The Scrapblog developers use cutting-edge technology to make it easy to use. I spent 17 years developing Macintosh software, so I know what it takes to develop a fine piece of workmanship like Scrapblog. It got my brain spinning and brainstorming again about all the cool new web technologies that grandparents can take advantage of. I love technology!

Does your brain spin too when you discover cool websites? Do you tell yourself, “Wow! I could use this to connect with my grandkids!” 

Two scrapblogs for Princess Adeline

One of our grandaughters turned 3 today, so I made her this digital scrapbook as a present. I titled it Sleeping Beauty Adeline. She won’t wear anything but princess costumes, and mostly only pink! It was inspired by one another digital scrapbooker over at Scrapblog. The background themes I used for each of these scrapblogs are from their set of free templates.

There’s an interesting story behind The World’s Fastest Bedtime Stories. When my children were young, they would enjoy having me make up bedtime stories for them. Sometimes, just to be funny, I would see how fast I could tell a fairy tale and say, “That’s all. Good night!” Then they would want another one, and another…. So, as a keepsake, I printed a dozen sets of books titled The World’s Fastest Bedtime Stories. They are only 1 inch square and 6 pages each. Sleeping Beauty is my fastest; just 19 words!

After I made the first scrapblog for Adeline, I wanted to make a “modern” version with current photos. So I asked my daughter to take some of Addie in her Sleeping Beauty dress. So Addie and her brother, Prince Isaac, acted out the story for me. My daughter emailed me the digital photos, and I uploaded the photos to my scrapblog. Here’s the Modern Sleeping Beauty Adeline.

Click on the ★scrapblog logo on any of these scrapblogs to see a larger version. Then you can viewed it in full screen mode if you like.

There’s no cost to join scrapblog.com. It is completely free. I recommend starting by clicking Quick Tour. After you’ve created one or more, be sure to check out their Get Crafty show for ideas. Once you publish your scrapblog, you can choose if to share them with everyone, or just those people you invite.

They have a nice community of scrapbookers, and a fun way to add other people as your “friends”. When you see a scrapblog you love, be sure to click its Love It! button.

Grandchildren and grandparents

This last scrapblog highlights Grammy Tanda’s loving relationship with our grandchildren. (Oh, there may be a couple of photos of me too.)

Grandchildren are the crowning glory of grandparents. ~Proverbs 17:6

I hope you’ve enjoyed my review of this amazing state-of-the-art technology. Hopefully, this has given you some ideas about how you can use Scrapblog to create fun memories and help you connect with your precious grandchildren. So head on over to scrapblog.com and enjoy making your own scrapblogs!

When you’ve created one, please come on back here and let us know about your experience using scrapblog.com, and feel free to paste a link to your scrapblog in the Website field of your comment.

Enjoy! Shayne

Thanks to Scrapblog artists Lori Barnhurst and Jackie Eckles for the cool themes! 

Copyright 2008, Shayne Packer. All rights reserved. You may review this article and link to it, but please do not embed the scrapblogs in another website. Thanks, Shayne

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Well, I’m flying high in the clouds like Superman. Except instead of a cape, I’m in jet airplane. I’m headed to see two of my grandsons, ages 6 and 4. Grammy Tanda had her turn a couple of weeks ago. So I figured, just to be fair to our grandsons, I should have a turn too! As I mentioned before, my wife and I enjoy traveling together, but sometimes our schedules don’t jive. School starts today, and as I write this, she’s teaching class about now. Probably trying to act tough and lay down the rules for her high school students in her Cultures and Cuisines class. (But she’s a “marshmallow”, and she knows it.)

So here I am, loaded with ideas of things to do with my grandsons this week. I’ve got my iPhone stocked full of fun little apps from the iTunes app store. (I’ll be writing about this in the near future.) I’ve got stickers. I’ve got crafts. I’ve got some play money I call “Grandpa bucks” that I’ll give them each time they chose the right or help clean up their toys. Then I’ll open up my “Grandpa Store”, my cache of goodies from the dollar store. We’ll go camping. We’ll be goofy. We’ll build a “fort” in the back yard. And maybe by the end of the week, I’ll understand why my wife felt so tired when she got home from her visit.

Grandparents are there to help the child get into mischief they haven’t thought of yet. ~Gene Perret

Boys – they’re so full of energy! As a young father, I learned it is best to be flexible, because sometimes, before we can finish one of my planned activities, these young’uns decide they want to do something else. Now, I wouldn’t want to run out of ideas on this trip. So I’m hoping to pick up a few tips and ideas for games, treats, activities, and so forth from you, our readers. Things that you’ve found particularly successful with young grandsons. We had such a wonderful discussion about what you grandparents like to do with your grandchildren in our Grammy’s back home post. Let’s continue the discussion here. What would you suggest for young grandsons?

Thanks, Shayne

My wife, Grammy Tanda, is back home after playing Grammy for a couple of weeks! She’s a high school teacher, and loves to go spend time with our grandkids for a few weeks at a time each summer On this trip, she went to see two of our young grandsons, 3 and 6 years old.

If you’ve read our About Shayne & Tanda page, you’ll remember that 7 of our 8 grandchildren live in 3 different areas of the country. Since it’s too far to drive, this means lots of flying. But Grammy Tanda doesn’t mind because it’s so fun being with the grandkids. (Oh, and I think she might like seeing our daughters and their hubbies too, but this blog is about grandparenting.) We enjoy going together whenever possible. But when only one of us can get away, we feel that it’s important enough, so we don’t let that stop us. Sometimes one of us is traveling on business somewhere close to where some of our grandchildren live. So we try to schedule in a little detour for even a day or two. If you plan it right, it doesn’t cost that much more to add an extra city to your flight plans.

Our grandchildren love Grammy! She is so fun and has so much enthusiasm in her role as a grandmother. Grammy is very creative, and is always prepared with fun ideas to do with the grandkids. She is aware of their short attention spans, so she watches for their queues, and is ready to shift directions when they start to get bored or distracted.

Now let’s see, on this trip, Grammy and the 2 grandsons went on nature hikes, swimming, fishing, crafts, cooking together, reading, playing fun games, just to mention a few things. She also also enjoyed helping with meals.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children. ~Alex Haley

I miss her while she’s gone, but we chat on the phone a few times each day. Sometimes she’ll call after being worn out or emotionally spent. Maybe you’ve noticed that young’uns can do that to you.

Tanda teaches Family and Consumer Science (what used to be Home Ec, but it’s so much more now days). So she is very good at connecting with high schoolers, and kids of all ages. And after helping me raise after raising five children (with my help), she’s had lots of experience communicating with children of all ages.

Now that she’s back home, she’ll keep the memories fresh by calling them on the phone often, and by video chatting using iChat on our Macintosh or with our VoIP videophone.

We’re interested to know what fun things you enjoy doing when you spend time with your grandchildren. We welcome your comments.

Thanks, Shayne