I live six states away from my granddaughter.

If everything goes right — if the flights work out, if nobody gets sick, if my daughter's schedule cooperates — I see her twice a year. Sometimes once.

You do the math on that. She's seven. If I'm lucky, I've had maybe fourteen real visits with her in her whole life. Fourteen. That's not a relationship. That's a series of photographs.

So every time I book a flight, I think about the same thing: what are we actually going to do when I get there?

Because here's what I learned the hard way. Showing up isn't enough. I'd walk in the door, she'd hug me, and then twenty minutes later she'd be on the couch with a tablet and I'd be in the kitchen with my daughter talking about nothing. Two days later I'd fly home having spent maybe an hour actually with her.

And I'd brought a gift, of course. I always bring a gift.

The gifts were the worst part.

I'd spend weeks on it. I'd read reviews. I'd ask my daughter for ideas and get "oh, she likes anything, Mom." I'd order something, have it shipped to their house, and then watch her open it.

She was always polite. She's a sweet kid. She'd say thank you and hug me.

And then it would go in the pile.

You know the pile. Every house with a child has one. The corner of the playroom where the good intentions go. Half of it still in boxes. Some of it never touched. I once found a craft set I'd sent for her birthday — still shrink-wrapped, eight months later, under a beanbag chair.

I didn't say anything. What would I say?

But I sat on that flight home and I thought: I am spending money to add to a pile. That's what I've become. The grandmother who mails things.

What I actually wanted was two hours.

Not a gift. Two hours where she's sitting next to me and she's not looking at a screen and neither am I.

And I want to be honest about the screen thing, because I know how it sounds coming from someone my age.

I'm not against tablets. My daughter works. She's exhausted. When that thing goes on, the house gets quiet, and I understand exactly why it goes on. I'm not judging anybody.

But I've watched my granddaughter with a tablet, and I've watched my granddaughter make something with her hands, and they are not the same child.

On the tablet, she's still. Her face goes flat. Something is happening to her.

Making something, she's completely different. She talks the whole time. She narrates. She holds things up. She asks questions. She gets frustrated and then she figures it out. She's doing something instead of being done to.

That's the child I fly six states to see. And I only get her a few times a year, so I'd like to get that version, please.

So this last trip, I tried something different.

I stopped looking for a toy and started looking for an activity. Something we could do together, at the table, that would hold her longer than ten minutes.

That's how I found the Magic Water Elf Kit.

I'll be straight with you: I almost didn't order it. I've been burned enough times that I've gotten cynical about anything that promises to keep a child busy. But I ordered it, had it shipped to my house in 3 days, and — this is the part I'm slightly embarrassed about — I opened it and tried it myself before the trip.

I wanted to know if it actually worked before I got her hopes up.

I mixed the powder into a bowl of water. I picked a mold. I squeezed the colored gel in, the way the instructions said. Dipped it. Counted to a few.

And a little creature came out. Solid. Three-dimensional. Sitting in my palm like it had always been there.

I stood at my kitchen counter, sixty-four years old, completely alone, and said "oh, that's lovely" out loud to nobody.

Then I made four more.

Then I got there.

I set it up on their kitchen table. She came over to see what I was doing — that's all, just curiosity, she wasn't even committed yet.

I let her do the first one. She dipped the mold, pulled it out, and the thing came free into the water.

"WHOA."

That was it. That was the whole hook. One word.

She sat at that table for two hours.

I want to be specific about what two hours actually looked like, because "kids love it" means nothing and I hate reading that in reviews.

She mixed colors I would never have put together. She made a purple one and a green one and then decided to try both at once to see what happened. She lined them up along the edge of the table in an order that made sense only to her. She named some of them. She made up a whole thing about which ones were friends.

And every ninety seconds or so, she turned to me.

"Grandma, look at this one." "Grandma, what if I do two colors?" "Do you like this one? I made it purple for you."

That's the part I didn't expect. It wasn't that she was busy. Busy I could have gotten from the tablet.

It's that she kept including me. She wanted me to see. Every single one.

At some point my daughter came in to see what all the noise was, stood there for a second, and sat down and made one herself. Then she made six more. The three of us were at that table for the rest of the afternoon.

Nobody looked at a phone. I'm not exaggerating and I'm not making a point about phones. It just genuinely did not occur to anyone.

And here's what I keep coming back to.

I don't remember most of the gifts I've given her. I truly don't. I'd have to go back through my order history.

I remember that afternoon completely. The light in that kitchen. The color combinations she was so proud of. The way she said "it's magic, Grandma" about eleven times in a row and meant it every time.

I flew home two days later with something I hadn't had in years, which is a specific memory of my granddaughter instead of a general fondness for her.

That's what I paid for. It cost less than the last three gifts that ended up in the pile, combined.