If your preschooler lives close to her maternal or paternal grandparents, or other relatives, great! If she doesn’t, it can be hard to keep close relatives present in spirit, if not physically.

Here are some ways to keep those family bonds fresh:

1. Make a family tree chart in your child’s room, and paste pictures of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Keep the tree simple and uncluttered. Include only family members she’s met already.
2. If her grandparents don’t mind being called at odd hours, paste their pictures in a special address book just for her, and write their telephone numbers next to the names. She can call them whenever she feels like.
3. Place pictures of relatives liberally all over the house - in frames, on bulletin boards, the refrigerator.
4. Pore through family albums together.
5. Let her make her own special personalized album with all her favorite people. Ask her grandparents or uncles and aunts to write special messages to her in the album.
6. Take a large map of the country (or world) and paste pictures of family members at the places they are at. It’s easy for a child to understand why she can’t meet her relatives everyday when she sees exactly where they are on the map, and how far from her.
7. Take all her dolls and teddies and let her make “her family” out of them, assigning relatives’ names to each doll or toy.

Enjoy!

Hope all my American friends had a great weekend!

Here’s a tip to for big time bonding with your child. Think of something that you share with her and her alone - maybe the two of you are first borns (my son and I are), maybe you have a physical characteristic that she shares, a habit or a quirk. It could even be something as simple as both of you having the same number of letters in your name, anything at all.  Use this as a secret code that gives you both membership to an exclusive Mommy-Child Club that nobody else can get into.

This is especially great if you have more than one child - it helps you bond with each individually. And it’s great for building self esteem too.  For now, you’re easily one of the, if not the most important person in her life, and a secret code like this builds her sense of identity.

Picture Courtesy - Flickr: Freeparking

This summer, begin a journaling habit, by creating a joint diary project with your child. Simply begin by jotting down special memories, even the most mundane ones, like events of the day. Jot these down together with your child.

While you could do most of the writing, she can contribute drawings. If you went out for a walk today or for an ice cream, she could draw the things she saw on the way, or paint the the flavor of ice cream that she had.

You can both write special messages to each other. It makes a great gift to give when nest-leaving time comes around.

If you have more than one child, have separate Mommy-Baby diaries for each of them.

It’s a nice way to capture the thousands of fleeting memories that our lives and our kids’ lives are so full of, before they disappear.