Balloon Tennis

I really didn't expect this one to be so much fun, but it kept my kids and their friends busy for HOURS!!  I've seen different versions of Balloon Tennis on the internet before, but we've never gotten around to trying it.  I wish I would have tried it sooner because I think they'll play this one a lot now that they know about it!!

All you need are some balloons and something to hit them with.  You can use cute flyswatters like I found at the Dollar Tree, or you can make them with paper plates taped to paint stir sticks or rulers.  I'm sure that there must be official Balloon Tennis rules somewhere, but we just had fun with it.

They thought it was the best thing EVER that they got to play with flyswatters, so we were off to a good start!!  They started out with "tennis practice" which involved just hitting it to each other.  The little boys started off in one room...

  

...and the big boys in another so they wouldn't give away their strategy.  I was having a great time watching them come up with the best ways to hit it.

Kelsey just wanted to do her own thing and ran around the house smacking the balloon.  I HATE balloons.  HATE them.  I'm so afraid that they're going to pop!!  I made sure that I didn't blow up the balloons too full, hoping that it would help them survive a good hit.  I have to say that not one balloon popped today!!

Then the boys decided to play 2 on 2 and the competition started!!  I have no idea what rules they were using but it sounded serious.  The only rule that I made up was that they couldn't hit each other or anything besides the balloon.  There was a lot of laughing so I wasn't too worried about it.

Then they all decided that they needed a "net".  A little piece of crepe paper was perfect.

Later on they made it harder by playing on their knees!!

And then they went back to normal tennis with volleyball rules.

I have to say that I fully expected there to be some "accidental" hitting of one's brother, but they all got along and played nicely for a really long time!!  That makes this activity a HUGE win if you ask me!!  

Once they got tired of it, they moved on to other things, but they kept coming back to this all afternoon.  I'm going to keep a few inflated balloons and the fly swatters handy so they can play more often!!

The good thing about this game is that you don't need many supplies or a lot of room, and anyone can play it.  You can make more or less rules depending on their ages.  I think everyone should try this one out!!

Let's Make Foam Paint

I don't know about your kids, but my younger 3 kids LOVE drawing on the sidewalk and driveway with chalk.  They'll spend hours drawing things and then when it gets washed away by the rain or sprinklers, they start all over again.  I was looking through Pinterest the other day (imagine that!!) and I came across some really neat looking foam paint.  I thought it would be fun to change it up a little bit and have them decorate the patio with this instead of chalk.

The original recipe can be found here but I'll show you how we made it.  This is what you're going to need:

- Small plastic squeeze bottles

- 1 cup flour

- 2 four ounce bottles of WASHABLE glue

- 5 cups shaving cream

- Food coloring

- Large Ziploc bag

- 1 snack size Ziploc bag for each color that you want to make

- Scissors

It looked really fun because it has flour and glue and shaving cream in it!!  How fun does that sound?! I had everything that we needed, but I didn't have any squeeze bottles so we had to go out and buy those.  We checked our closest craft store but they didn't have any.  I decided to look in the Dollar Tree on the way back to the car and we ended up finding these bottles of glitter glue.  I figured that we could just squeeze out the glue and use the empty bottles.  So if you can't find small squeeze bottles to put the paint in, try looking for these.  You can't beat 3 for $1.00!!

The original post suggested making the paint in a big ziploc bag and I thought that was a great suggestion so we wouldn't get glue all over the place.  You start with some flour in the bag.

Then you add some glue...

...and some shaving cream.  Hopefully your can will be easier to open than ours was!!

Once you have everything in the bag you seal it up and mix it until it's nice and smooth.

Then you cut a corner off of the bag and squeeze some into a snack size bag so that you can mix in the color.  Make one snack size bag for each color of paint that you want to have.  Then add a few drops of food coloring.

And then mush it around until it's evenly colored.

Then you just cut a small corner off of each bag and slowly squeeze it into a plastic bottle.  It's a really neat consistency so it goes in the bottle easily.

Then take it outside and draw away.  My kids spent a really long time drawing little pictures all over the patio.  I haven't tried washing it off yet, but the original post said that as long as you get washable glue, it should come right off.

  

 

My kids really enjoyed making and playing with this stuff.  I hope your kids will too!!  The great thing about it is that it's good for kids of all ages!!  My oldest wasn't home when we made it, but I'm pretty sure that he would have been out there drawing with them if he was home. 

Summer Day 1 - Summer Jars and Journals

Happy first day of Summer Vacation everyone!!  I'm so excited to be starting this blog as summer begins.  I have a lot of really fun things planned for my kids and I can't wait to hear about what everyone else is doing too.  We can all share ideas and make this the best summer ever for our kids.

 I have 2 projects today that I think your kids will love.  We're going to be making Summer Jars and Summer Journals.  They're both really simple to make, and all 4 of my kids love them.  That right there is HUGE in our world!!  We've been making them for the past few summers, and it's really fun to look back on them during the rest of the year.

A summer jar is like a memory jar full of little things from the summer.  If we go to a new restaurant we'll grab a business card or a napkin and throw it in the jar.  When we go to an amusement park or a movie, we'll save a ticket stub for the jar.  The kids save all kinds of things for the jars and they get pretty creative as the summer goes on.  From pretty beach rocks to wrist bands from water parks to carnival game tickets, if it's something that reminds of you of something that we did over the summer, we save it for the jar.  We've been doing this for the past 7 or 8 summers and we love opening the jars up from time to time to see what's inside.

This year's jar is just a plastic container that I got at Walmart.  I used to use pretty glass ones, but ever since the kids started wanting to open them on their own I switched to plastic.

The sticker peeled right off of the container and I just printed out a label that I made in Photoshop and then wrapped some twine around the top of the jar!!  And there you have it... a professional summer jar!!  One year I had all of the kids write messages and picture on labels and then they stuck them all over the jar.  That's an easy way to make it into more of a  project to keep them busy too!!

So far we don't have anything in it, but I know it's going to fill up quickly!  They're always so excited all summer long to fill it up.

We've also been making Summer Journals for the past few summers as well.  I just buy inexpensive composition books and we cover them in construction paper and decorate the covers.  These are the books that I bought this year.  I think they were about .75c at Walmart!

They spent awhile decorating the covers and we even cut Cole's down to make it pocket sized.  I almost ruined my counters and came this.close to cutting my finger off, so I would recommend not letting the kids do that part!!  

They turned out pretty cute.

Then they spent a long time writing in them and decorating the pages and getting them all ready for summer memories.

Obviously the amount of writing that they do in their journals depends on their age.  Kendall (who's 11) keeps track of what we do every day and the funny things that happen.  Kelsey (who's 5) usually writes a few words and mostly just draws cute pictures of things that we do.  I love looking at all of them at the end of the summer.

I hope you and your kids have fun making these too!!

Happy Summer!!

Summer vacation is finally here!!  I can't believe how fast it snuck up on us this year.  It seems like it was just Spring Break, and now we're already done with school.  I'm so excited to be able to slow down a little bit and enjoy the days with my kids rather than run around like crazy people all of the time.

I love planning fun things for my kids to do, and people are always asking me to plan some things for them or to share some ideas for things that they can do too.  In the past I've tried to post some things on Facebook, but it's never been very consistent so this year I'm going to try something different.  I'm going to try to post a new idea or two every day on this blog.  Then if you're ever looking for something to do you can check to see if we've done anything that your kids would like to do too.  Some days it might be something really simple, and other days it might be something more elaborate.  Hopefully over time we'll end up with a big list of activities.  Please feel free to share some ideas with me too because I'm always looking for more ways to have fun!!

My kids are ages 5-13 so I'll be focusing on a little bit older kids.  I feel like there are already so many blogs out there with ideas for little ones, so hopefully we can help each other out with the older ones.  They're harder to entertain!!

Our family always kicks off the summer with our annual Summer List.  I ask the kids for some ideas, and I spend some time looking online for things to do, and then I combine them all into one big list.  I would encourage everyone to make a list of their own because it really helps on days that you don't know what to do.  I've learned from my own mistakes though, so take my advice on this one... If there's anything that you REALLY don't want to do, don't put it on the list.  There's nothing worse than having your kids bug you all summer to do something that you hate doing!!  Example... I HATE making lemonade stands.  I don't know why, but I do.  One year I put it on my list so I got to hear my kids bugging me alllll summer long to have a lemonade stand.  That made me dislike our stupid lemonade stand even more when we finally had it.  So if you don't want to do it, don't set yourself up for failure!!

This is our summer list for this summer. 

I try to keep the ideas mostly low cost and a good variety of things for my boys and my girls to do.  Not everyone in my family is going to be able to do everything on the list, but we try our best.  My 5 year old isn't going to go rock climbing, and my 13 year old probably won't join us on the teddy bear picnic, but I try to have things for everyone.

Your list doesn't have to be typed up and printed out!  It can be written out on a piece of notebook paper and still be lots of fun.  The important thing is just to make one!!  So get busy and start thinking of ideas.  I'd love to see your lists too!!