Three things to do for Grandparents Day

Three activities in here, one for each age, plus a tip to run before Sunday and a long-distance ritual that runs on the miles. (Apple season and fall baking are next week.) Grandparents Day itself is the 13th, so there's a week to set it up. The 0–2 one takes fifteen minutes and a roll of tape.

There's a length of paper in the house already: the back of a roll of wrapping paper, a flattened grocery bag, two feet of easel roll. Tape it flat to the floor with painter's tape so it can't slide. Then sit on the same side as him and draw while he draws, both hands on the one sheet at once.

He’ll copy the hand he can see, which gets more out of him than handing him a crayon and stepping back. When he stops, write the date and both names in the corner and put it on the fridge. Fifteen minutes, and the sheet stays at your house.

The crayons in the drawer will start this. They’re sized for an adult grip, though, which is the difference between a one-year-old drawing and a one-year-old dropping. We’d put Honeysticks Super Jumbo Crayons on the table instead: thick enough for a whole fist, around $19 for six, and beeswax throughout, so a chewed end is a non-event.

Most of what a preschooler makes at your house is in the car by seven that evening. This one gets an address before it's built: pick the window it's going to live in, and tell her which one. Cut a frame from a strip of black card, tape a sheet of clear contact paper sticky side up to the table, and let her press torn scraps of tissue paper onto it however she likes. Seal it with a second sheet, trim it, tape the frame around the edge, and hang it where you said it would go.

Choosing the window first turns a craft into a commission. She’s made a thing for one specific piece of glass in your house, and she’ll look for it there the next time she’s through the door. Thirty to forty minutes with a four-year-old, and most of that is the tearing, so put out more tissue than the panel needs.

Tissue paper and contact paper from the drawer will get you a panel, and it’ll be lovely for about two weeks. Then the tape gives up and it curls off the glass, which is a short life for something that was supposed to stay. Melissa & Doug’s Stained Glass Made Easy: Butterfly kit runs around $12 and peels and presses rather than glues, so she finishes it herself and it comes out looking like something you’d hang on purpose. It’s rated 5 and up, so four-year-olds will want a hand with the peeling.

Walk the house before he arrives and write down every job you've been putting off because it needs a second pair of hands: the far end of a tape measure, a shelf held level while it's screwed in, a ladder footed, a wire fed behind a cabinet. Four or five on a sheet of paper is enough. Hand it to him at the door, let him pick two, and do them, crossing each one off in front of him. Two jobs is most of an afternoon.

The list runs without buying anything, with him on flashlight and tape-measure duty. It runs better when his own hands are doing the work, which takes tools scaled to them. We’d get Hi-Spec’s 16-piece kids tool set, around $30, because these are scaled-down real tools instead of painted plastic: the tape measure measures and the screwdriver drives. There’s a working hacksaw in the box, so tell the parents up front and run it as a supervised set.

The plan for Sunday is usually to arrive with something: a card, the good cookies, a small wrapped thing. That lands, and it’s forgotten by Wednesday. What a child remembers is being known about, and her parent is holding the information that makes that possible. So send one text this week, three days out: “Grandparents Day is Sunday. What’s one thing she’s got good at lately that I might not know about?” Then use the answer out loud, once, to her and not to the room, before anything is unwrapped. “Ruby. Your mom told me you can get all the way across the monkey bars now.”

Distance means your Saturday happens somewhere your grandchild has never stood, which turns an ordinary errand into a place worth reporting back from. So hand her the clipboard for a week. On the next call, ask her to give you three assignments to carry out in your own town: find the oldest tree on your street and photograph it, buy the strangest thing in the candy aisle and report whether it was any good, count the dogs you see on Saturday. Over the following week you do them and text back one photo and one sentence each, nothing more. On the call after that she scores you out of ten and issues three new ones, which costs you a phone camera and about ten minutes a week.

Know a grandparent who'd spend a Saturday hunting for the oldest tree on her street because a seven-year-old told her to? Forward this their way. →