It’s a rainy, blustery day in Autumn today. How about you? I just came from my church where I picked up duplicate copies of each of my grandkids’ Awanas books to keep at my house. That way I can help them learn their verses each week without having to send the books back and forth. Yes, it’s a little more expensive that way but I love doing it. It saves on the stress load when one of us is taking the kids to Awanas and the other of us has the books! With all the stress in a Sandwich Generation Senior Home Care Giver and Grandparent’s life, we definitely don’t need more. True?

I was thinking about what a blessing all sorts of duplicates can be for us – both for our grandkids AND for our aging parents.

For my grandkids, I’ve routinely keep on hand:

• Diapers, Pull-ups, Good-nites (my all-time favorite night-time pull-up), and Swim Diapers
• Bottles, Sippy Cups, and other special equipment they’ve needed over the years. Also, specialized medical equipment/medications for special needs and/or emergencies, such as feeding bags, allergy kits, etc.
• Formula, favorite foods, non-perishable lunch box items, and easy freezable breakfast items
• Medications – did you know you can ask the pharmacist to split liquid medications into two bottles to make it easy to store some at each house? It’s very handy!

For aging parents with special needs such as those requiring dementia care, walking assistance, etc., many of us in the Sandwich Generation may only be helping part-time to give our parent’s spouse or other full-time caregiver a much-needed break. Some items that can help in that situation include:

• Incontinence pads such as Depends, Poise Pads, etc.
• A walking cane, a transport wheelchair, etc. This can make it easier for the caregiver to bring your senior parent back and forth so they don’t have to load up the car as much.
• Specialized medical equipment for special needs and/or emergencies, such as feeding bags, bedpans, etc.
• Special and/or favorite foods such as Ensure
• Medications

As the commercial likes to say:

Extra supplies for grandkids and/or aging parents  = $xx

Storage = Does take room to store

Stress relief = PRICELESS

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Duplication = Stress Relief: Priceless for the Sandwich Generation!

“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” Ps 119:11 in the King James Version is the quintessential verse for explaining why we memorize Bible verses. The NASB translates it a bit differently, "Your word I have treasured in my heart, That I may not sin against You.” Either way you look at it, it’s clear that Bible memory is downright practical for us in our walk with Christ.

Many of our grandchildren are memorizing verses through their Christian schools, homeschools, or such programs as Awanas. It’s exciting when God allows us to help them in this worthy endeavor.

It’s important to remember that different children learn at different speeds and in different ways. My children were all very bright. They could each learn a verse in a matter of minutes. No matter how many verses they had to memorize for school, they could have it totally memorized with only a day or two of preparation, and the verses would stay with them long after the class was over.

Having worked with a variety of children through home school, Sunday School and Awanas, not to mention nine wonderful grandchildren, I’ve discovered it is rarely that simple. While I’ve seen many kids learn that easily, I’ve seen many more learn much more slowly. Then, of course, there are a wide variety of learning issues such as learning disabilities, auditory disabilities, dyslexia, being on the autism spectrum, etc. You may find that your grandchild is not comfortable saying the verse or even able to say it. Regardless of how your grandchild learns, it is still wonderfully worthwhile for both you and them to help them with the verses. It instills in them the knowledge that it is important to you, therefore making it more important to them. It shows them you care about them. It teaches them about your relationship with God. In addition, it is sometimes easier for a child to work on things with grandparents, that they would normally drag their heels on with parents .

I have found that no matter how a child learns, just hearing me say the verses to them three times a day, most days of the week, is sufficient to help them learn it. If they work cheerfully with you, they will learn it fairly quickly. Even if it looks like they aren’t really paying attention, it often gets through. I usually try to couple this Bible memory time with snuggle time and reading time. My goal is to help them learn verses while wrapping the whole process with a sense of love, joy, peace, and even fun. That’s how I feel when I am enjoying a good sermon or Bible study and that’s what I want for my grandchildren.

If they have the option on how much they memorize, such as with Awanas’ Sparks, I’ve learned that a lot of verses poorly memorized are usually not as valuable as one or two verses well memorized. Four verses memorized in a month equals 36 verses memorized by the end of the school year. That’s 36 verses more than they knew at the beginning of the year, and 36 verses God can use throughout their lives to keep their way pure according to His Word.

If your grandchildren live far away, you can encourage them by asking them what they are memorizing. They will have fun telling you their verses and you will be blessed by hearing them.

Whether near or far, helping our grandchildren memorize God’s Word is another wonderful way to pass on our spiritual heritage to them.

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Enjoying Bible Memory With Your Grandkids

If the grandkids are visiting and you can’t get out to the mall to walk or you’re looking for something a little more active to “shake the wiggles” out of them and keep yourself in good shape, here’s some grand fun ideas. Now I do have to preface this with saying these are intended for those of the Sandwich Generation who are in reasonably good physical condition. If you are not sure, ask your doctor first. My doctor would tell me I’m not doing them enough!

DODGEBALL – Works for all ages from 2 on up. Have all but one person stand in front of some kind of wall. We like to do it in front of the garage door. Have the person who is IT take a ball (One of my favorite ways to save money – I use the grocery store plastic balls of any size. They are soft enough they rarely hurt, cheap, and great fun for a variety of games.). IT tries to throw the ball at one of the other players. When they get hit, they are then IT. It’s important to remember with the little ones that they have very short attention spans. So it’s up to grandma or grandpa to make sure all get to be IT regularly.

I get in a little aerobics exercise and give my grandkids a sporting chance by trying to get them as if I was playing handball. I whack at the ball with my hand and it goes all over the garage wall. This requires more exertion than just throwing the ball. Thus I get more exercise and my grandkids don’t get out as quick. Just be careful not to whack too hard in their direction.

TAG – There are several variations of the old beloved game from our childhood. Our current favorite is a takeoff of a game we play at our Awana’s meetings which is a take off of the video game, PacMan. The person who is IT has the ball. He has to try to touch one of the others with the ball. No one is allowed to run but walking fast is fine (there’s those aerobics again). You must, however, walk only on the agreed upon lines. We have enough lines and cracks on our driveway we just use those. If you don’t have enough, you can use outside chalk to draw your own lines. You can make them in a circular pattern, a square pattern or any pattern you want. Then everyone has to walk on those lines to get anywhere. Of course, the younger the child, the more often they’ll get excited and forget to stay on the lines. Depending on the child and how the game is going, you may choose to exercise a little grace there. One of my grandchildren has added an extra dimension to our game. He prefers to ride his little scooter car around in the area we are playing. If he is in our path, we have to turn around and go back the way we came, just like the video game. It definitely makes it more fun and challenging.

Hairy Ball CATCH – My granddaughters and I love to play Hairy Ball Catch. Amazon has a couple of different urchin balls similar to what we have, though ours is rounder and more ball, less hair. If you click on the words Hairy Ball, they actually have those in stock. The one below is no longer available at Amazon, but you might be able to find it elsewhere. Any of these would probably work well.  I got mine at Target or Wal-Mart for about $6. The great thing about this type of ball is that it is much easier to grab onto than most normal balls. So even the 2 year olds can usually catch this ball. We have so much fun throwing it to each other. Generally they like to throw it to me and I then throw it to the next one. That keeps us all on task and makes it easier for the little ones to catch it. When you do miss the ball, I highly recommend running to get it. Thus you get in some extra exercise while having lots of fun .

FLYING DISCS – All my grandchildren and I love a good game of tossing a flying disc around. There are so many varieties available now, starting with the most famous one, the Frisbee, and, for the most part, they are all very affordable. One of my favorites, which I picked up at the airport (not so affordable there!), is a soft rubber flexible one that is only about three inches in diameter. It is great for playing in the house on a rainy or snowy day. It’s soft enough it would be very difficult to break anything. Again, most of the exercise with this game comes from chasing it when you miss catching it.

GRAND TIMES AND GRAND EXERCISE – I remember reading an article when my kids were young that recommended playing with your children to help you stay in shape. That is just as true for grandparents as it is for parents. Not only that, these make a fun addition for your grandkids’ homeschooling programs. Have fun trying these out. Do write and share your favorite game/exercise with your own grandkids. Just leave the information in the comments below, or send an email to Kaye@SandwichINK.com .

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Grand Fun and Grand Exercise for GrandParents and GrandKids

A picture is worth a thousand words – but what do you do with a thousand pictures? One love we in the Sandwich Generation often share is that of photos of our beloveds. Thanks to the gifts of all of my talented children, I am truly blessed with thousandS – yup, you read that S correctly – of photos. Pictures of kids and grandkids, of parents and grandparents, and of places we’ve been and places we wish we’d been. They all excel at making good use of those pictures – online, in Creative Memory albums, as part of a dvd, and more. But for those of you who are more like me, OK on computers, but not as gifted creatively, here are some things I’ve discovered that have helped me have fun with the photos too.

GIMP

Photoshop is a wonderful piece of software that is very complicated and VERY expensive. Photoshop Elements is also wonderful and much less expensive. Then there is the really frugal option, GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a totally free software program that is usually compared to Photoshop. You can find the latest version at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ . You click on DOWNLOAD GIMP 2.6.0, save it, run it, and voila, a photo editing software package that is, indeed, very close to Photoshop. One slight warning, it can also be as difficult to work with as Photoshop. You know how it goes, the more goodies they build into the program, the harder it is. There are some books on how to use GIMP  (very expensive ones) you can purchase through Amazon. Or you can stay frugal and find some free ones online. I just discovered them today so I can’t tell you how good or bad each one is, but there were some that looked especially good! I found and copied these onto my hard drive to use as reference:

The GIMP website has a manual for GIMP 2.4. The most current version for download is 2.6 so that should cover most of what GIMP offers. You can find that at http://docs.gimp.org/en/

Beginning Gimp – From Novice to Professional is a 549 page manual at Scribd available for free download as well. You do have to sign up to be a member. I had already done that last week for another project so I just logged in and downloaded the PDF version. I started with the text version but that was hard to read, so I would recommend staying with PDF. You should be able to go to http://www.scribd.com/doc/4064601/Beginning-Gimp-From-Novice-to-Professional-eBook , and press the download button. It will then ask you to log in or register. Once you do that, you can then select to save it onto your hard drive (I download all my ebooks into a file called Ebooks in My Documents). I had only recently heard about Scribd and am very pleased with it so far. It looks to be an excellent resource! As they explain in their FAQ, Scribd is “a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds.”  They have thousands of works online already and it’s sure to keep growing.

Grokking the Gimp can be found at http://www.freebieslinkshare.com/Ebooks-PDF-Magz/free-gimp-e-book-grokking-the-gimp-1/ . In case you are wondering what Grok or Grokking means, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know either. After researching it a bit, I have come to the conclusion it means “to understand.” So this book could also be called Understanding the Gimp.

The GIMP cheat sheet, located at http://www.lugod.org/presentations/gimp-saclug.pdf ,  is dated 2003 so I’m sure there have been some changes. Nonetheless, I will be keeping this close at hand as I’m always trying to remember which button does what. If I used the program every day I wouldn’t need it, but since I only do it in the spare time I can carve out between caregiving, grandparenting, blogging, and Awana-ing, I need all the cheat sheet help I can get! 

If you really want to dive deep into GIMP, here is a GIMP users group site, which offers, among other things, a tutorial of 2.6. http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/gimp-2-6-new-features.html

Well, that should keep us busy for at least a day. Tomorrow I am planning on telling you about some other great and free (or downright cheap!) options for photos. Until then, I hope you have fun Grokking GIMP.

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GIMP Is Great for Photos

Church was great today! The music was wonderful and the sermon was interesting, educational, and funny (I love that combination). We were reminded of the importance of hiding God’s Word in our hearts that we might not sin against God. My memory is not so hot for memorizing any more but as I keep helping grandkids memorize their verses it plants those seeds into my head as well. I love that! I have fun making cute little charts for them with their verses and posting them all around the house. I have one hanging in the guest bedroom, I have one beside the toilet, and another one in the shower. I also keep one in the car for when we’re driving. During the school year, I use Awana’s verses and school verses. Each summer, we work on special projects. This past summer, we memorized The Lord’s Prayer. As soon as they have it totally memorized, we’re headed for Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate! For my grandkids who don’t live as close, I have fun making coloring pages and putting Bible verses on them. I also love singing Bible songs to them on the phone as we chat. It’s a great way to build memories, deepen our relationship, and share God’s love and Word together.

Another way I have found to plant God’s Word in my heart is to Scripture pray for others on a regular basis. I made a chart in Excel and listed over 90 of my favorite verses on it. Each day I pray for all of my beloveds – family, friends, neighbors, and others God brings to mind. (Yup, I have a chart with their names as well – that whole memory thing again J). I pray for various needs I am aware of.  I pray Romans 10:9 for any who are unsaved or not walking with the Lord. Finally, I read through and pray out the three verses I have listed for that particular day. Over the course of the month, I wind up praying 90 verses for all those people, as well as myself.  After doing that for several years, I’m finding many of those verses becoming more and more familiar to me and I trust that if ever it was necessary, God could bring those verses to my mind.

What ways have you discovered to hide God’s Word in your heart? We’d love to hear your ideas!

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Hiding God’s Word in Our Hearts