Last year, I shared a recipe for very yummy sugar cookies. I use that recipe to make cookies and then decorate them with Halloween candies. Making and decorating these cookies with your grandchildren would be a fun Halloween activity. Here’s the link to that recipe.

Are you having a party for your grandchildren on Halloween? Need a few more ideas? Here are some that you might want to do. Make sure you adapt them to fit the age of your grandchildren and your circumstances.

Digital Scavenger Hunt.
If you have more than five grandchildren coming over for a party, you might want to divide them into two groups for this activity and have grandpa be with one group. Write up a list of things that each group is required to do. (It’s best to either have different lists so the groups are not doing the same things at the same time. Or, put the activities in a different order.) Give each group the list and a digital camera. They need to perform each activity on the list and take a picture of the group doing the activity. The first group back to grandma’s house is the winner. Afterwards, have fun looking at the other group’s photos.

Example activities for the lists: Standing in the candy aisle in a grocery store with each team member holding a bag of candy. Holding or standing around a pumpkin on your front step. Trick or treating. (Make prearrangements with a friend to let yourgrandchildren do this at her home.) Sitting on a park bench (or an appropriate place) painting their fingernails black. Dancing in a McDonald’s parking lot.

Build a Scarecrow.
Have a variety of old clothes, hats, gloves, old pillowcases, newspapers, string, and markers. Divide the grandchildren into teams. Give them 15 minutes to build a scarecrow.

Candy Corn Toss. Divide your grandchildren into two teams. Give each person 20 pieces of candy corn. Place a plastic pumpkin (the kind stores sell for trick or treating) about 10 feet away. Have the grandchildren toss their candy corn into the plastic pumpkin. The team that has the most candy pieces inside their pumpkin is the winner.

Halloween Pictionary. Write Halloween words or phrases or activities on slips of paper. Divide into two teams and play Pictionary using the Halloween words.

Pumpkin Bowling. If you don’t have old plastic drinking glasses that you don’t care about, purchase six plastic ones from your local dollar store. To play, set them up in a triangle form with a row of 3 glasses, then 2, and then one. Place them fairly close together. Get a small pumpkin. Have your grandchildren take turns rolling the small pumpkin trying to knock over the glasses.

I hope you have a safe and happy Halloween with your grandchildren.

Digi-Gram

Grandma Ideas

Vampire Count is a perfect game to play at an evening Halloween party — it’s a game for all ages. Moms, pops, grandmas, grandpas. Youngsters and teenagers.

The only props you need to play this game are a deck of cards and some scary music and a way to play the music such as an iPod hooked up to speakers. (You don’t really have to have scary music. It justs adds to the ambiance if you do have it.) When you invite guests, recommend that they wear dark clothing.

Before guests arrive, set up the music system outside in a common area such as on your patio. Get a deck of cards. Count out one card for every guest. Determine which card will be ‘it.’

After guests arrive, gather in the common area. Let them know where the boundaries of play are and give them a couple of minutes to inspect the area to find places to hide. Call everybody back to the common area. Tell players they must stay within the boundaries.

Shuffle all of the cards. Pass the cards out face down so each guest has one card but cannot see anybody else’s card. They look at their card. The person who gets the card that is designated the ‘it’ card is the vampire. The others are victims.

Collect the cards and put them in a safe spot. Turn off all lights in and outside the house. The darker the better.  Turn on the scary music and have the vampire close his eyes and slowly count to 25. While the vampire is counting, the victims run away and find a place to hide. Once they are hidden, victims cannot change their hiding place. When the vampire gets to 25, he turns off the music and yells out, “I vant to drink your blood!” Then he begins searching for his victims.

When he finds a victim, he gently puts his hands around the victims’ neck. The victim cannot struggle or flee. The victim gives a blood curdling scream and then turns into a vampire. The victim-turned-vampire now helps the vampire search for other victims.

If the vampires are having a difficult time finding any of the remaining victims, the head vampire yells, “Come to Transylvania.” All victims who have been found return to the common area where the play began. The vampire counts all of the victims. If there are still victims that are not found, the vampire calls out, “Oh victims, where are you?” The remaining victims have to give a ‘nervous’ cough to assist the searching vampires.. The first vampire can continue calling out “Oh victims, where are you” until all of the victims are found. Victims have to give a nervous cough every time the first vampire calls out.

When all victims have been found and turned into vampires, everybody returns to the original starting point. Begin a new round by shuffling and passing out the cards and following the remaining rules of play.

When we played this game several years ago, we had invited families so we had guests of all ages. On one of the rounds, we couldn’t find one of our son’s friends. We looked, and looked and looked. When the main vampire called for the ‘nervous cough,’ the cough led us to our son’s Ford Ranger pickup. We looked under the truck. We looked in the bed of the truck. We looked in the cab of the truck. We walked around and around the truck. We couldn’t find the last victim. Finally we gave up. The main vampire called out for the victim to come out of hiding.

Imagine our surprise when the friend stood up from behind the truck. He had been laying on the back bumper! Even though we had walked several times around the truck, nobody saw him because he kept so still (and his clothes blended in with the dark of the evening . . .1). We had a great time playing this game!

If you’re planning a Halloween party for this Friday evening, you might want to give this game a go. Try it. You’ll like it.

Digi-Gram

Here’s a picture of our little vampire . . . Click on it to see a larger picture.

It’s so tiny. It’s so mini. It’s so fun. It’s the Flip Mini camcorder!

Simple to shoot. Simple to share. It has been touted as one of the most significant electronic products of the year. (Do I sound like a sales ad? Maybe that’s because I’m so sold on the product!)

I played with one the other day. It’s really easy to use. It will record up to 60 minutes of video. It is compatible with both the Windows and Mac OS. And the neatest thing is that to connect to your computer you don’t need a hodge podge of cords and cables. Just flick a little switch and out flips a USB connection. (Hence the name ‘flip.”)

The 1G sells for $130. The 2G runs $150 and for $180 you can get the the 3G version. Obviously, the more you pay, the more features you get. Obviously. The least expensive one comes in 6 colors while the most expensive one allows you to design your own look if you so choose. Pick from a gallery of tons of designs. Or create your own pattern. Or upload your own image. Way cool.

If you’ve held out (like me) from getting a camcorder because they are rather prices, this might be just the thing.

This would be a great technology to help you stay connected to those grandchildren who live far away. Your son or daughter could video your grandchild playing soccer, at a piano recital, coming home from school and eating an after school snack, showing off a pet doing tricks, their outfit on the first day of school, or dressed in their Halloween costume and with all of their loot from trick or treating.

You could video tape yourself reading a bedtime story to them, doing a ‘day in the life of grandma,’ showing them the fall colors where you live, taking them on a virtual tour of your city, of you singing happy birthday to them, of you demonstrating how to make a dessert (and then send them the recipe to make themselves).

This would make a great Christmas present for a grandchild. Or a great birthday present. (For you, too! You might want to ask Santa to put one in your stocking this Christmas!)

Digi-Gram

Isn’t it interesting how you ‘meet’ people through the Internet? A fabulous set of grandparents, Grandpa Shayne and Grandma Tanda ‘met’ me, and, as we conversed through e-mail, I realized that I knew them. They used to live near me and Grandma Tanda went to school where I grew up.  Amazing, huh?

Even more amazing is their blog: Grandparents TLC (where TLC stands for Technology to help Loving Grandparents Connect with Grandchildren). This is exactly what I am interested in!

Grandpa Shane has a posting about creating a children’s storybook using stickers. He has a little video that explains how he made the book. I strongly suggest you read what he wrote. After reading his blog posting, I was very excited to make a storybook. Is it too early to create one for my seven month-old grandson, Spencer??

If any of you, Dear Readers, have any fun ideas you would like to mention please feel free to post a comment anytime to this site!

Digi-Gram