Grammy Tanda and I love to spend time with our grandchildren in person, but since most of them live in three other time zones, we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like. So some of our most pleasurable moments are when we are chatting “face to face” over the Internet with our grandkids.

If you enjoy talking with your grandchildren on the phone, you will love video chatting even more! It’s video conferencing software you run on your computer that lets you talk with and see your family. It’s just like in the Jetsons cartoon—live audio and video.

What could be worth more than seeing the grin on your grandchild’s face when they see you talking with them on the screen? They’ll be proud to show you how much they’ve grown and to show off their first missing tooth. Even grandbabies will respond to your voice and smiling countenance.

Somethings are just better communicated face to face, where you can see expressions and gestures. Compared to letters, email and even telephone calls, video calls can make conversations much more interesting and intimate. You’ll have more to talk about, and your grandkids will more easily remember you or your face.

Now watch this video. It’s full of examples and cool ideas for you.

A grandparent’s job is to give positive encouragement; to be a cheerleader and a talent scout. ~Grammy Tanda Packer

Fun things you can do on your video chat: read storybooks and show them the pictures, make up stories, sing, dance, play games, help with their homework, be playful, play peek-a-boo, make funny faces, and tell knock-knock jokes.

Ask your grandkids to sing and read to you, and tell you jokes and stories. Have them show you their drawings, crafts, homework, new clothes, acrobatics and somersaults.

Options for free video chat software

You’ll need a computer, a webcam with a built-in or separate mic, and a broadband Internet connection. Different programs use their own protocols, so you and your family will need to use the same software. Each of the following programs allow you to make video calls worldwide.

iChat from Apple is an application that comes free with every Macintosh. If you have a Mac, iChat is the best software for video chatting. You can even have a video conference with up to 3 other Macs at once. Since it uses the AIM protocol, iChat works well with AIM on other computers.

AIM is an application you can download to your computer. It uses the same protocol as iChat.

Skype is another popular program for making video calls. Download the program and sign up for a free account. Computer-to-computer calls and video calls are free.

Google voice and video chat is integrated into gmail in your web browser. It’s a great option if you and your family have gmail accounts. Anyone can sign up for a free gmail account.

How to get started

1. Choose an application and install it. (Consider what your family may be using.)
2. Launch the program.
3. Create a screen name and password (first time only).
4. Share your screen name with your family.
5. Arrange a time to call.
6. Turn on your webcam.
7. Log in to your chat program.
8. Initiate the video call by clicking the appropriate buttons, or click “Accept” if your family initiates the call.
9. Click the video icon by their name to see their video. (Note: Some programs make you click a button to allow them to see your video.)
10. Enjoy!

Videophones are another option for video conferencing. These are special phones with an LCD screen. No computer is needed, but they need a high-speed Internet connection. You and your family both need the same brand of videophone.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then live video is worth ten 10,000 words. ~Grandpa Shayne Packer

We know you’ll love video chatting with your grandkids! So go try it.

Enjoy – Grandpa Shayne

Announcement: This post is part of a blog carnival hosted by Susan Adcox, About.com’s Guide to Grandparents.

We’d like to hear from you. Please comment below to tell us about your videochat. What fun things did you do on the call with your grandkids.

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[We are pleased to feature Emily Wilberg as a guest writer. Emily’s son, Gabriel, was stillborn at 21 weeks gestation in May 2002. Her husband, Nick, is an illustrator and designer, and the two of them have designed several items for grieving parents and grandparents, including scrapbooking quotes suitable for scrapbooking a baby who has died. She has 4 living children in addition to her angel Gabriel. Emily is the author of the blog, Stepping Stones: a path to healing after the loss of a child. Emily says, "I never thought my life would take this turn. Maybe I had this particular baby (Gabriel) and married this particular man (Nick, an illustrator) in order to do some small good in this world.]“

[October has been designated as "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month", with October 15 as "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day".]

When my son Gabriel was stillborn at 21 weeks we were blindsided. I had no idea that in this age of modern medicine and in a country as prosperous as the United States that babies still died. I thought it was something that only happened in third world counties, or maybe back in the pioneer days. And yet, it does happen. When a baby dies it is hard on the entire family — but I can imagine it is uniquely hard for a grandparent. Not only are you, yourself grieving the loss of your grandbaby, but your own child is hurting as well. What do you do? What CAN you do?

Often people do nothing. It used to be that when a baby died (either before or shortly after birth), the mother was not allowed to hold or see her child. She was told to forget and to try again as soon as possible. Things have changed. It has been discovered that it is better for the healing process if the mom is able to see her baby if possible; for the parents to hold and dress and photograph and name their child. If the baby was lost earlier in the pregnancy the parents may not be able to do even this. But the moment a mom finds out she is expecting she starts making plans for, and loving, her child. A loss at any stage is devastating. To be told to forget and move on can be hurtful; no matter how well intentioned the advice is.

There are support groups to help a family facing this trial. But even though this outside help is important, I often hear that families do not feel supported by those closest to them: their own family members. Part of this is due to differences in how our generations have been told to grieve. Part of it is probably due to the fact that family members are grieving themselves. And part of it, maybe, is that it is just too sad. Too sad to think about and too sad to talk about and certainly too sad to make a particular point to remember. And yet, that is often exactly what grieving parents need, people to remember.

You need to do what is best for you while grieving your grandchild. Nobody grieves the same and there is no straight path for healing from this loss. But it is also important to reach out to your child.

How can you help your child who has lost a baby?

Listen. Let us talk. Let us cry. Ask to hear our baby’s story and ask what we named our child. Refer to them by name. Our child’s name is precious to us; we treasure an engraved ornament or even something as simple as writing our baby’s name in a card to let us know you are thinking about us both.

Holidays can be particularly hard. Understand if the parents may not be up to big family celebrations at this time. If you do have a family dinner, a possible tradition to start is to have a toast to remember all missing family members not at the table with you. You can also make a donation to a worthy cause or do a service project in your grandchild’s name.

Technology can help families pull together in times of trial — there are many ways. Send emails often. Take advantage of inexpensive long distance to call frequently — with mobile phones, or iChat, or Internet phones such as Skype and Vonage. Use reminder services for special occasions like the ones available at flowers.com and electronic greeting cards.

The Internet brings our world closer together and makes multiple resources available that may not be available in your immediate community. There are many online resources and support groups for families grieving the loss of a child. There are even specific sites for grieving grandparents. I have listed a few helpful sites below.

Aloha Sand Photos is a recent project I have started with my sister is to take a photo of a child’s name written in the sand and post a photo of it on our blog. I am in Maryland and she is in Hawaii, and the names come from all over the world. One grateful parent recently sent me an email stating, “I love technology. I can simply do this… and photos can come across the world from Hawaii. I am grateful. It has brought me into a very sorrowful yet hopeful club of parents with children who grew wings far too early.”

God sends children to enlarge our hearts, and make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and affections. ~Mary Howitt

Thank you to Grandpa Shayne for letting me write this guest post on his blog. I am sorry this topic is needed at all, and yet, I am thankful to be allowed to share my experience it in the hopes it will bring comfort to someone else. I hope today is gentle for you.

Peace -Emily (Gabriel’s mom)

Online Resources

• Aloha Remembered Blog: Have your grandchild’s name written in the sand and a photo posted on their blog.
• Stepping Stones: a path to healing after the loss of a child is a good general blog for finding helpful information.
• Stepping Stones article: Common Signs of Grief
• Grieving Grandparents Bereavement Support Article
• Grandparent Grief pamphlet from the SIDS network
• The Grief of Grandparents article by Compassionate Friends
• Helping a Grandparent Who Is Grieving Article by Alan D. Wolfelt, PH.D
• Healing Hearts: Support for Grieving Grandparents Email Penpals
• Remembering Our Angels: Gifts and ribbons for purchase.

Do you have any thoughts or ideas about helping grandparents and parents heal after the loss of a child? We welcome your comments.

Please share this post with someone you love.

[Editorial note: We are pleased to feature Grandpa Davison as a guest writer. He and his wife have 5 grandchildren, are retired, and live in the U.K. By using the Internet, they are keeping in touch with their grandchildren and family.]

Using the Internet to stay close to family and friends at home and abroad

How do you raise your children and grandchildren to enjoy the full benefits of the extended family, if grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends are scattered around the world. This is a problem I have lived with first hand!

When I was a young teenager in the 1950s

My family emigrated from the UK to the USA, settling down in Florida. We left almost my entire family back in the UK, My uncle’s family had crossed over before us and had settled in Winnipeg. My parents stayed in touch with the rest of the family through the occasional “Blue Flyer” — a flimsy, hard to read, light weight aerogramme. While it was relatively expensive, it was far quicker than surface mail which could take up to six or eight weeks. Phone calls were very rare and only used for family emergencies. No wonder we had no real ties with the larger family remaining at home. Sadly some would pass away before we returned to see them.

Adding to the problems

Returning to the UK in the 1970s, I further complicated my communications difficulties by bringing my American wife and children to live in England. Now I was closer to my English relatives, but my brother and his family still remained in Florida and all my wife’s family lived in the US Midwest.

So many more letters and a few more phone calls were needed. Transatlantic phone calls still cost a few pounds to make so they were only used for special occasions. Over the next few years we made friends with many locally based US Air Force families, all of whom returned to the US to live and retire, further increasing our web of international friends and family.

Technology to the rescue

Just when we were beginning to feel the burden of high postage costs, especially around Christmas, transatlantic phone calls became more competitive dropping to ten pence (16 cents) per minute. Our letter writing just about stopped, but the greeting cards continued to flow and we still limited our phone calls to a small number of family and friends and tried to keep them to a short duration. This was still not the way to stay in touch although it seemed the solution. In the mid 1990s, we started using email but found that few of our friends in the USA were hooked up to the Internet and even fewer in the UK. Most of those emails went to family or friends via their work email addresses until the wider spread acceptance of the Internet in the early 2000s.

Now it works!

Just about everyone we know now has personal email so it is very easy to stay in touch worldwide. We have even used ship board web connections via satellite to read and send messages via our own web email service — quite costly however! As most of our contacts have moved to broadband (ADSL), exchanging photos is now quick and easy. One downside however, is the proliferation of email jokes with huge attachments (and absolutely no personal news). This hardly constitutes keeping in touch in my books but at least we know the senders are still alive!

Free International phone calls

We now use Skype, one of several Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services, with excellent results. (I have also used MS Messenger but I find Skype the best for me.) This enables us to talk to any other Skype user (almost) anywhere in the world through our PC mic/speakers, free of charge.

Skype also offers a “Skype Out” service that allows you to make cheap international calls with Skypeto telephones and mobile phones. We use it on a pay-as-you-go top-up basis. This service allows me to talk to most overseas land-line phones for about 1.5 pence per minute (about 2.1 cents) — about 25% of current international phone rates. Even better, with an inexpensive webcam, we can now “video conference” our family, provided they too have a webcam connected via Skype. While voice multi connections are possible via Skype, I do not believe it is yet possible to have a virtual video family reunion on the Skype service, although I am sure they are working on it! Skype now offers “Skype” phones which can provide an enhanced home phone that combines all the functions of land line phones, mobile/cellular phones and web phones for a fraction of traditional day to day phone costs. My friend and technical advisor is currently “checking” this out so watch his blog on www.richardfarrar.com.

Sharing Family Photos

We have tried using Flickr to share our photos around our family via the web but the uploading times are slow and not that easy. We have also found that many of our friends and family found the viewing service hard to use so we have opted to use our own web site. Currently I load the photos quickly and easily via FTP and my audience can access them at their leisure. The hard part for me, is cataloguing and labeling each photo, a process involving ASP code writing and therefore not too user friendly. I will move my photo library to our blog site soon, automating the process and making maintenance and access much easier.

Family Blog Sites

On the subject of blog sites, that seems to be the way ahead with the “family communication network”. What has started out as a hobby hopefully will get more of my friends and family commenting and contributing content (see www.thegrandparentsblog.com).

Publishing Deadlines

Creating content can be fun but is time consuming, however it is a great way to keep in touch. We use WordPress software and that makes blog site management easy. It also brings plug-in benefits — extra little tools to manage the site and to improve the communication process and content value.

Twittering

One such plug-in displays a link to twitter — an internet communication tool that takes short messages and posts them automatically to your subscribers. I use twitter, but have only a small following — my fault, because I am not yet used to adding news items and so far not many in my family/friends network have signed up.

In Summary

Thus far, we have been able to find old friends we thought we had lost touch with forever. We can stay in daily contact with brothers and sisters and other family members, between our sadly, far too infrequent visits to each other. It is getting better every day as web technology improves and our grandchildren now have a much greater appreciation for our global family.

Sadly too late for me, I saw my grandparents only twice in their last twenty years because of the transatlantic divide! I am so grateful that our own grandchildren will not have the same regrets.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future. ~Alex Haley

Find me at

• The Grandparents Blog
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email

- Grandpa Davison

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Photo by kreg.steppe

Hi. Grammy Tanda here. I love being a grandparent. I just wish that my grandchildren lived closer. A curse of our modern culture I guess. I often long for the Norman Rockwell days of having the grandkids down the block and spending lazy summer afternoons on the porch playing with them. So much for fantasy. So how does a long distance grandparent keep in touch and have a close relationship with those precious grandchildren? One way I keep in touch with grandchildren are weekly phone calls. Even the youngest smile when they hear grandpa’s or grandma’s voice. Each grandchild’s age has its own unique challenges, but the important thing is just do it! One of the challenges in our high tech, multitasking world is to keep the grandchild’s attention. The following are some of the best suggestions we have tried and received from other grandparents.

1. Make it a routine. Kids love routines, knowing things are predictable, and that they can count on a call from grandpa or grandma each week. This also allows you to build a personal relationship with each grandchild. If possible, set up a standing date to call at a certain time every day or certain days depending on your schedules. It’s something the kids can look forward to.

2. Have a few knock knock jokes ready to tell each time you call. And ask them to tell you a joke. Take turns.

3. Make up funny stories like mad libs (word game) together, or make up stories with your grandchild as the main character. My kids always like making up stories over the telephone with their grandparents. Usually they need some help getting started, but then they like adding details to the story (like what color the super-hero is wearing, etc.). It’s a special treat when they get a call at bed time and can make up a bedtime story together. You’ll find your grandkids have great imaginations and you’ll learn a lot about how they see their world. Great fun!

4. I love to sing silly songs to the grandkids. I begin when they’re born. These songs become favorite memories. So when I call, we often sing their favorite songs. Sometimes they sing with me; other times they just want to listen. But it always seems to bridge the miles and remind us of our favorite times together.

5. We absolutely love talking with and seeing our grandchildren on our videophone. They loved showing off, doing somersaults and being silly. The videophone is so fun and you don’t even need a computer. It’s just like the Jetsons. Live video and audio. Another service is Skype, which is a carrier that shows your picture with your voice on your computer. You can talk to anyone in the world who also has skype for free. The ultimate video chat experience is iChat, an easy-to-use, full-featured communications program that comes free on the Macintosh. Video chatting is the next best thing to having grandma in a rocking chair on the porch to talk to any time you need her!

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being. ~Margaret Mead

Grandparenthood is the best. It is kind of like the teenage years all over again. We get all of the fun and none of the responsibility. One of the blessings though, is the opportunity to connect and enjoy those wonderful grandkids. Don’t let miles keep you from the close relationship you’ve always dreamed of. Try a weekly phone call; and share you experiences and tips with the rest of us.

What things do you enjoying talking about with your grandchildren? What other suggestions do you have to keep their attention?

Grammy Tanda