Most grandparents have memories of sitting on Grandpa or Grandma's lap, sharing story-time and quietly drifting off to sleep.
We remember charging dragons, exploring foreign lands and meeting new characters.
These stories helped fortify our imaginations, developed our reading skills and built memories and shared experiences with our grandparents and parents.
They helped create connections and shared experiences which last a lifetime.
Along with Easter egg hunts and make believe, story-time is a sign of a slower, more gentle time.
Even though grandparents, and sometimes parents, frequently live far away from their grandchildren, story-time, reading skills and imagination building in today's highly competitive world are more important today than ever before.
The great thing about the modern world and technology is that despite the distance, we are more connected than ever before.
Grandparents can share story-time through recordable books available at specialized stores, but this is an expensive and limited solution.
You record a story that can be read back but if you are like most grandparents and distance parents, you want to share many stories and adventures with your child.
Enter YouTube and easy video editing software.
It has become very easy for grandparents and separated parents to create and animate video bedtime stories, upload them to YouTube and share story-time with their distant children.
This is the first article in a series that will guide you through the process of creating your own video stories and sharing them with your grandchildren through the marvels of YouTube, Facebook, and maybe just email.
The software is available to most of us, and as a grandparent or parent: we can narrate.
There are a number of free and low cost video editing tools, available for PC's and Macs.
We all have the simple resources that it takes to produce our own video stories for sharing with our own children, which are a computer and microphone for recording the audio, a scanner for the story-book pages and pictures and some video software.
YouTube has some simple video software that you can use to create your kid-friendly masterpiece.
Stay tuned for the story writing and editing details, and remember copyright laws and ownership.
Reading a story to a grandchild or child of your own is one thing, scanning books and other copy written materials for profit or wide distribution is quite another.
For now, enjoy sharing stories and tales with your family and 'happy video's'.