Summer Fun List 2016

It is summer again! I have just a couple days left of summer school teaching, then that means fun filled days with my creative, enthusiastic little girls, 5 and 3. To me the most important thing is to do enough to keep them engaged, which is code for out of trouble, and help them create beautiful memories of their childhood, which is code for hope they get tired enough to go to bed without a hassle at a reasonable time.

My plan is to have a list of possible activities around town that we can plug into at any given moment. Here are my go to activities for 2016:

1.  My girls are Disney crazy. They love all the characters from Disney Junior, all the princesses, and even the classic characters. So I was really excited to learn that the Disney Store has fun free events every Wednesday. Some times there are movies or Sing-A-Longs. Afterwards, we can play at the Busch Garden themed, International Mall play area. This isn't a new place for us, but the kids always love it. We have learned that in the evenings there are less people and less chaos at the mall play areas.

2. For years we would go to the library story times, but those became very crowded and less about reading and more about corralling kids. Barnes and Noble has great story times too! Many of these events are Friday and Saturdays but there are weekday story times too. We sometimes have a cookie at the cafe as a treat. B&N also has reading programs for older kids.

3. Bowling for free! A friend of mine mentioned this national program so I had to look into it. You can take your children to bowl two games every day. As I look into it and filled out the information there is a one time cost of $29.95. It is a good deal especially if you have multiple kids and live in an area where you never know if it's going to rain. I also figured out if I go with my kids at least twice, the one time cost would at least allow us to break even.

4. Bayside Gymnastics Academy has open gym time once a week for a low cost. The girls love to jump and tumble and run. This space is great. It can also get a little wild for young kids, so I avoided it when my kids were under 2. However, we have a great fondness for this warehouse and it is designed to contain kids in a huge safe padded space.

5. My kids love art. We have attended several events sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete such as the Painting in the Park in April, and the Breakfast with Santa in December. These events have become staples to our family fun time. MFA is really welcoming to kids. There is a chunk of the museum that is just for kids. They also have activities to do with the kids for the traditional exhibit areas. They also have a cafe at the museum but there is ice cream across the street. The museum is next to Straub Park which has open spaces and great banyan trees kids love to play in, climb up and swing through every time they see them.

We have a few more things we will do....

1. Beach 
2. Make and decorate cupcakes
3. Make pizzas
4. Splash parks 
5. Pool time
6. Build a fort (Indoor and Outdoor)
7. Create an art museum and invite grandparents to the opening
8. Game night (Candyland, Uno, Chutes and Ladders, Mermaids)
9. Have an banana split
10. See Finding Dory
11. Go to a Rays Game
12. Go to a Rowdies Game
13.  De Leon Springs and Old Spanish Mill Pancakes
14. Visit the Atlantic Ocean 
15. Roller Derby

It will be impossible to do it all and still have stay at home veg out and play days (those are just as important to me), but I like having a list of ideas that I can look at when I am feeling less creative. Cheers to summer!

Lean In

Recently, I read an yet another parenting article where the author gave great practical doable advice about reducing your daily parenting stress and keeping up with the daily things like making dinner, getting the kids dressed and doing one daily chore around the house. As I skimmed it, I realized I already do all of those things and still I feel parenting stress. My two year has spent a week eating nothing but pretzels and pickles. Nothing works. No positive reinforcements, no negative reinforcements, and no bribe has been alluring enough to convince her otherwise. She has dug her heals in and pickles and pretzels are it. The parenting stress has peeked and I can chose to handle in two ways:

1. I can follow her around the house with a variety of food choices, fork in hand and pray for the miracle of her giving in and eating something slightly more nutritious.

                                                                                 or

2. I can let it go (you may add the Frozen tune here if you like or let that go too.) Chances are that my two year old will all on her own want to broaden her pallet and try something different.

I opt for #2. I call this Leaning In. My second child has given me the greatest gift of awareness and parenting skill I could ever imagine: learn to pick your battles. Most of us moms have already consider what the tween and teen years may bring and we have heard this idea of picking battles with hair styles or clothing styles with our future 15 year olds but the thought doesn't occur to us when juggling our preschoolers. If they want to wear dirty pajamas, why not? If they want to wear sandals with socks, why not? If they want to wear everything blue and pick out what character on their diaper, I say LEAN IN. These are not the fights.

My parenting goals are that our children grow up to be kind, respectful, hard working members of society. Lean in. Let things go. And do it often.

We are lucky enough to live close to the beach. Beach trips typically take a lot of preparation with kids. You must remember the sand toys, the snacks, the towels, the blanket, the sunscreen, the drinks, etc. Sometimes the idea of packing it all up is exhausting, instead I take them to the park which they love and requires no prep on my part. However, upon recent reflection I considered that perhaps the complications were mine. The kids love the beach. They won't care if I forget something. I threw some sand toys in a bag along with a couple of juice boxes, grabbed the sunscreen and a blanket and away we went. For two solid hours the kids played. They ran up and down the shoreline, hunted for shells, created castles and instantly smashed them. By the end of excursion, they had gotten a little more wet than I expected since the water was still freezing it didn't cross my mind they would want to get in to it. I didn't bring back up clothes. When we were ready to leave. I pulled off their shorts, wiped off their sandy feet with the sandy blanket and we trotted off to 7-11 to get a post beach slurpee.

I didn't worry about the sand in the car. I didn't worry about the pant-less children in the convenience store. I worried about making lasting memories with my kids and appreciating their childhoods as deeply and thoughtfully as I could that day. I say Lean In! Allow some chaos. Allow piles of dirty laundry or heck all piles of freshly folded laundry! Don't let your stress become their memories.

Totally Awesome Cheap Kid Backyard

Slowly we have been working on our backyard. It is small. We are lucky enough to have a pool but it's actually positioned in the middle of our house. This was a really highlight for me, because I always thought that the girls would be able to play in our backyard without worry of the pool. The swampland of our backyard and drainage issues, have been a significant hurdle. Over the last year, we have been working on that. After two years, we can hang out in our backyard. I have diligently been looking at Pinterest for various ideas on what to do in small spaces that is inexpensive and kid oriented.

First of all, I wanted them to have a play set of some kind. We were looking at many different types, but with a small space it's hard to really  know what to do. I kept my eye on Craigslist. I knew we didn't want to spend a lot of money and the wooden play-sets are expensive. On the low end, they are close to $600. I found a relatively small one for $100. We went and measure it, then Eliot and his dad went took it apart in chunks and put it back together in our yard. We purchased a couple new swings, new screws and bolts and added a coat of wood finish to protect it.

The playhouses were a similar story. These things are crazy expensive brand new, some of them range close to $400, even the second hand stores were selling them for $200 which technically is half price. I just looked on Craigslist for almost 8 weeks. I found one that was terribly beat down, everything faded for $20, I spray painted  it bright solid colors and it looks lovely. We found the other one for $30 in really great condition.

The sand boxes were also second hand and so was the kid picnic table my in-laws got the girls which is great to outdoor mess activities and fun lunches. I placed the old play kitchen outside as a mud pie station for the future, when I am ready to commit to a mud day.

On Pinterest I saw a couple of really easy things that I knew I needed to do. One was spray painting stepping stones. We had a stack that happen to come with the house, so I just used the extra spray paint I had to rainbow it up. The girls love those things, more than I would have guessed. They jump from one to the next over and over. I also saw a chalkboard screwed to the fence which seemed adorable to me. Most of the links lead to really complex and expensive directions for this project. My original plan was to go to Home Depot and purchase chalkboard paint and a piece of wood which roughly would have been about $50, then we found a pre-made chalkboard. It is about 4 feet by 2 feet and it was being sold as an outdoor sign option, it was $9.97. We pre-drilled the holes and attached it to the fence. I added a dollar store bucket with rope next to it, we drilled a couple of holes in that too and poof $11 for the same effect. We figured for this price point, we could replace it in the future if we wanted with very little effort or even add another one.

The piece that I was most excited about was the fairy garden. I was going to wait until the summer, but decided why not now. I planted a couple of herbs which I have been wanting to do for a long while and bought a couple of dollar flowers. I let Lydia pick them out. The bucket was a Walmart find for $5 (meant for a drink container at parties I drilled holes in the bottom) which was a fourth of the price of some of the flower pots that I was looking at. At Walmart I found a Fairy Garden kit which I could pass up for $12. We planted the flowers together, she added all the kit elements, and daddy moved it to the back yard so we could take care of it. I hope for her to make a fairy house this summer to add to it too.

That is basically it. I found $1 buckets and bowls at the dollar store to stick in the cubies of some old shelves that were laying around outside anyway so I put them on their sides. The buckets have shovels, some have rocks, some have other sand toys but they are to be played with as they see fit. The grown up part of the yard at this point is just a couple of chairs and umbrella for the sun and a fire pit for the evenings. Eventually we would like to add a couple more chairs and the hammock we bought on our honeymoon that we have never hung up. Right now this is a great play space and I am so excited to be able to open the backdoor and not worry about them. They can play while I get dinner ready. They can play while I work on the computer right inside. It's ideal. A great fun space for less than $300 including paints and additional accessories.