What do you actually do with a grandchild who lives three states away — or an ocean away? The short answer: anything you do together and then do again. A one-off activity builds nothing; a standing date builds everything. Below are twenty ideas that survive past the novelty, the reason most of them fade around week six — and, at the end, a third way the usual lists never mention: inventing a serial story together, one chapter at a time, with the child deciding what happens next.
AARP put numbers on it in its 2018 survey of American grandparents: among those who see their grandchildren less often than they would like, 67 percent named distance as the number one reason (source: aarp.org) — well ahead of busy schedules or family tension. The gap is almost never about wanting to. It is a map. Which is also why long-distance grandparent has become an identity in its own right, with its forums, its books and its rituals.
The appetite behind it is large enough to count in subscriptions: Famileo, a service that gathers a family's news into a printed newsletter mailed out every month, has around 260,000 paying grandparent subscribers (source: bretagne-economique.com). A quarter of a million people paying, month after month, to hold their family's news on paper. Distance is not fixed in a weekend, but it can be worked at.
1. The same book in two copies: one chapter a week, then talk it over on the phone.
2. Read aloud over video, with the child turning the pages of their own copy.
3. The homemade audiobook: one chapter per voice message, played at bedtime.
4. The phone serial: ten minutes of invented story on Sundays, always stopping at the worst moment.
5. The annotated book: mail a novel from your own childhood with your notes in the margins.
6. Cards over video, with two identical decks on either side of the screen.
7. Slow chess or checkers: one move a day, by app or by text.
8. The reverse scavenger hunt: you hide three clues, the child directs you by camera.
9. Simultaneous drawing: same subject, ten silent minutes, then reveal.
10. The riddle of the week, with the answer saved for the next call.
11. The same recipe at the same hour, each in your own kitchen, tasted on screen.
12. The shared garden: two basil pots planted the same day, photographed every week.
13. Guided building: you at the camera, the child at the table, the same three materials.
14. A collection kept jointly — leaves, rocks, stamps — added to by mail from both ends.
15. The skill lesson: your pie crust, your knot, your knitting stitch, filmed once and kept forever.
16. The real letter, in an envelope, in their name — the object children remember best.
17. The monthly box, opened on video and never before.
18. A postcard from your own town, as though you were traveling where you live.
19. The traveling notebook: it goes to the child, comes back to you, each adding a page.
20. A printed family newsletter, for households that would rather not add another screen.
All of these work. None of them touches the underlying problem, though, and it is worth saying plainly: a weekly call almost always drifts into a status report. How's school? Did you get your grades back? The adult asks, the child answers yes — and at seven a child truly has nothing to report, because they do not yet know their life is a story. A month in, the child drags their feet toward the screen, and the grandparent concludes they have outgrown it.
What is missing is not one more activity. It is something shared that keeps going between calls: a thing that exists when nobody is online, that needs the other person to move forward, and whose next installment you are impatient for. A correspondence chess game is one. A story is a better one.
Nearly every product aimed at grandparents offers the same thing: tell your life. A prompt a week, recorded memories, a printed memoir at the end. That work matters — we wrote a whole page on the questions that actually open their memories. But it is a single-narrator form: the grandparent talks, the child listens. Lovely, and slightly sad — the child is the audience, never the author.
Shared imagination inverts it. You do not co-invent someone's past; you invent a world together, and both of you hold equal power over it. The mechanism is the old one described in writing a story with your child: the child decides (who the hero is, what they want, what goes wrong), the adult holds the pen. At a distance it becomes a serial — a chapter a week, characters who come back, an ending nobody knows yet.
What separates it from a story improvised over the phone is that this one stays. Every chapter is written down, kept, illustrated, and the child can reread it — or be read it aloud — at bedtime, six hundred miles from you. It stops being a call. It becomes a book in progress that the two of you hold by both ends.
During the call, ten minutes is plenty. The child retells the last chapter to you, and then come the three questions that decide the rest: what happens now? who shows up? what does the hero want to do? The child rules on it, and you write down their words, not yours. That is where the whole value of the thing sits.
After the call, you enter their answers and the chapter gets written, watercolour and all. That evening the child reads the page their own decisions produced. Next week you pick up exactly where you stopped — and a child who knows a story is waiting for them comes to the screen differently.
One honest caveat, because it shapes the setup: today a book lives in a single account. There is no two-household mode yet where each side signs in from home, and no invitation to send to the other house. In practice one of you keeps the book — usually the grandparent — and the other household gets the chapter through a share link, or hears it read aloud on the next call. It is a shared ritual before it is a shared account; the tooling does not make the bond, it serves it.
That is exactly what Fablier is for: three questions, and Numa, Fablier's pen, writes the chapter — three hundred words, at the reading level you set, in the tone the child picks, with a picture painted for that scene. The reader turns the book page by page and also reads it aloud, sentence by sentence highlighted, for a child who cannot read yet. Chapters number themselves, characters file themselves into the book's notebook, and the finished book prints or downloads with its cover.
If your grandchild is still too small for a serial, the same principle works in miniature for the bedtime story: it is not length that makes the bond, it is the fact that it continues.