Rainy Days Can Lead To Fun and Educational Activities for Grandparents and Grandchildren

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It's definitely been one of THOSE weeks for me and my Sandwich Generation family! A two day heat wave (nice, at first) led to the discovery that our air conditioner didn't work (NOT nice but glad we found out now instead of in the middle of a hotter longer heat wave!). Our refrigerator handle broke off. Seriously! Who ever heard of a fridge handle breaking???? And weather watches and warnings up the wazoo. (Very grateful the brunt of the storms missed us and praying for those who were in harms way!). Major homework tests and term papers and deadlines have hit this week that I have been part of helping with (I'm so glad I'm just helping and don't have to do all the work my grandkids have to do! 🙂 ) And I won't even go into all the disconcerting news headlines that have me stop to pray plenty. Suffice it to say that all of this and more going on this week have kept me busier on things I didn't mean to deal with instead of working on various projects I meant to work on. Then again, isn't that pretty common for all of us in the Sandwich Generation as we juggle merrily away. 🙂 

I did have more time to surf than normal as that is something I can do while waiting (which I spent a LOT of time doing) and it doesn't require much in the way of brains (always good on extra busy weeks! 🙂 ). As a result, I came up with some awesome resources that I've saved into Evernote and wanted to share with you. (See all these clouds – virtual and real – DID have a silver lining! 🙂 ).

LEGO Loving Grandkids and Grandparents, like moi and my grandkids, will love Mary Prather's excellent website resources at Homegrown Learning, and her grand Pinterest board. It's got so many ideas for combining LEGO fun AND educational ideas! 

My grandkids and I are sloooooowly reading about Hudson Taylor, one on one, when they spend the night at my house individually. When we are all together at their house, I am reading to them all about Elisabeth and Jim Elliot using my Kindle app. I really like to encourage my grandkids in mission-minded thinking as I consider all of us to be missionaries for God – some at home and some away from home. So I was thrilled to read the post by Melody of And Here We Go as she has some terrific ideas and some awesome links including one I especially appreciated from Harvest Ministries – with a year's worth of ideas for teaching kids (and grandkids) about the world, interwoven with mission-minded lessons. What a wonderful gift to us all! 

I found the cutest drawing lessons by Rose Gauss that I'm definitely going to use when visiting my younger grandkids. They'll have fun learning and I bet I can even learn to draw finally, too. What do you think? Just click here, then click on each picture to find wonderfully simple directions for drawing each image.

And on a stormier note, my daughter's house lost power this week. If my granddaughter had been typing her big paper there, she might have lost it all. We were so grateful she was working on it at my house at the time since I didn't lose power. It reminded me to teach her about "back up, back up, BACK UP" often, often, often – and then we BOTH backed up because I was not practicing what I so frequently preach! Then I discovered that many power companies now offer wonderful apps which may include outage information.  I found ours by checking at their website though I could have typed the company name into the Apple iTunes store search too. And it works great – even better than the website itself for giving info including estimated time to get power restored. Very cool! 

So how about you? What's been keeping you extra busy while juggling the various Sandwich Generation issues of life? Found any silver linings in the midst of the clouds? We'd love to hear! 

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