Indoor solutions for ‘Mom, I’m bored!’
As much as I remind my children, “only boring people get bored,” they still complain of boredom — especially during the summer when they don’t have school, their usual activities are on hiatus and many of their friends are away at their cottages.
If it were up to my kids, they’d happily watch television (or YouTube videos, in my daughter’s case) until their eyeballs melted. While I do think a bit of extra screen time is OK during the summer — after all, it’s their vacation — it’s still only a small portion of the day. And those summer days? They can be looooooong.
We spend a lot of time outside in the summer, (A LOT) but there are also times when I need to keep the kids entertained inside — and without me — since I work from home.
So here are 13 ways I’ve answered the moans of, “I’m bored,” and I plan on using every single one of them this summer.
1. “Put on a performance.”
Our dress-up clothes don’t get a lot of use anymore, so I’ll tell them to find costumes and put together a play for me. We also have a kid-friendly keyboard and microphone, so maybe there will be a concert as part of the performance.
2. “Make a circuit.”
Our son’s been talking about circuits ever since the Discovery Centre re-opened. Every time I Google how to make our own, I get icky flashbacks to Grade 6 science. But I’m determined to get the basics this summer — battery, light bulb, bulb holder, insulated wires — and see if we can make it work.
Continue reading my other 11 ideas in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
Converting a child’s closet to built-in shelves
When faced with a mess, it’s often our instinct to conceal with storage bins or doors. But in the case of our son’s closet, the answer was actually to remove the doors completely.
While it wasn’t a wreck of hidden dirty laundry and broken toys — like his sister’s closet — his closet did have some serious issues:
- He had way more hanging-up space than he needed for his 10-15 button-up shirts
- He couldn’t even reach the hanging bar (Don’t you love when kids yank on the bottom of a shirt until it pops off the hanger?)
- The single (too-high) shelf was heaped with bins of clothing and books nobody could reach
- The side shelves were a useless mess of more books
His dresser needed to be in the middle of the closet in order for the drawers to open without hitting the closet doors, leaving dead space on either side (and black holes for random items of clothing).
So one Saturday morning, I tore every single thing out of his closet until I was staring at white walls, a hanging bar, a too-high shelf and two random MDF shelves jutting out of one side.
I stood there and looked at the closet for a long time, trying to figure out what was going to work for it.
The answer, I decided, was to take off the bi-fold doors and transform it from a closet into more of a built-in nook …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
How (and why) we taught our kids to cross the street
It was a big step — about 15 little kid-sized steps, actually — letting our kids cross the street without an adult.
I had no idea at what age it was supposed to happen, but I didn’t think it would be so soon. It’s different for every family, likely, because it depends on the traffic of your street. Oh, how I wish we lived on one of those sleepy cul-de-sacs where every driver slows to a crawl.
Our street has a lot of cars whipping around corners at high speeds, and it’s always made me nervous. So many drivers don’t seem to be paying attention. Between the puppy and the kids, it feels like I’m constantly making sure nobody’s chasing a ball into the street.
Ever since we’ve lived here, whenever the kids wanted to go across the street to see their buddy, one of us held their hands and walked them over. When they were ready to come home, we’d go retrieve them or my friend would walk them back.
The trouble with that, though, was that the kids slipped their hand into ours and crossed without paying attention — eager to get to the other side of the street and play. Even though I made a point of stopping at the curb and doing an exaggerated look in both directions (“Look both waaaaaays!”) they didn’t need to look because I was doing the looking for all of us.
So this past spring, as the kids began hanging out even more, my friend and I decided our kids (aged five, five and seven) were probably old enough to cross the street alone. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to walk them back and forth — it was more that we wanted them to know how to safely do it by themselves …
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
Y O U M A Y A L SO L I K E …
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DIY monkey bars
Three summers ago, we added a slide to our back deck. Two summers ago, we built a wooden teeter totter. Last summer, we bought a secondhand play structure and the kids enjoyed the novelty of having their own swings.
But every time we went to a park or a school playground, they were completely obsessed with something we didn’t have: monkey bars.
I knew we needed to build our own, but it seemed . . . difficult. Where would we get the bars? How would we make sure they didn’t tip over? The local stores only seemed to sell swings, slides and climbing rope systems — no monkey bars to be found.
I was at the point when I thought it would be an impossible DIY when I saw a monkey bar kit* on Pinterest — just six bars and a little bag of screws — for around $40 CDN with free shipping. I ordered it when I was half-asleep one morning and almost forgot about it until they arrived three weeks later.
I wasn’t expecting the set to come with instructions — I just figured my handy husband would rig something up — but it did, and he followed them to a tee. (Not my style, but it works for him.)
The kit didn’t include the wood or most of the hardware, so we needed to buy four five-inch carriage bolts, four washers, four nuts, 44 2 1/2-inch screws, pressure-treated lumber (two 2” x 4” x 8’ boards for the steps, two 2” x 6” x 8’ boards for the bar supports, four 4” x 4” x 8’ posts) and four fence post holders (giant spikes) to fit around the 4×4 posts.
This project barely even requires any cuts, since the 4” x 4” x 8’ posts are already the right height for monkey bars and the 2” x 6” x 8’ boards are already the right length. The only boards that need to be cut are the two 2” x 4” x 8’ boards — from which we cut four steps (each 23 1/4” long) and eight little supports (each 3 1/2” long).
So my handy husband started the build by marking where the six rungs needed to be — exactly 12 inches apart, starting 12 inches from one end — and attaching them to the 2” x 6” x 8’ boards to make what looked like a giant ladder.
(Because the monkey bars were designed to attach to an existing play structure, there’s a 24-inch gap on one end between the last bar and the end of the monkey bars. The bigger kids can still reach the steps from that last rung, and the gap didn’t seem worth modifying the plans.)
Connecting the ‘ladder’ to the four 4” x 4” x 8’ posts wasn’t difficult — and now they really looked like monkey bars — and neither was building the steps using the pieces of 2’ x 4.’ The tricky part was getting the massive fence post holders into the ground in exactly the right spots, at exactly the right angle.
These huge metal spikes went 18 inches into the lawn and it wasn’t a picnic getting them perfectly in place. My handy husband finally used scraps to build a spacer — two chunks of 4’ x 4’ post separated by the width of a step — so he could pound the posts into the ground knowing everything would line up properly.
Despite the minor post hiccup, the monkey bars were up in less than a day — which happened to be our son’s seventh birthday. Swarms of kids were all over them immediately and I had to wait for an afternoon when no one was around before I could stain them (Sico’s Autumn Brown).
I love seeing the kids fly across the bars — you should see their callouses — and hanging by their knees with delighted smiles. I have no idea what we’ll build next summer to top this, but it’s going to have to be really, really good.
My complicated relationship with bread
The following is a sponsored conversation with River Road Bakehouse. All opinions and carb-crazy anecdotes are my own.
When you are trying to eat low-carb, the last thing you want is to be contacted by a bread company who wants to send you delicious free bread.
Well, OK, the LAST thing you want is to be locked in a room with the aforementioned bread … and a plate of perfectly-softened butter. But a sponsored post about bread? Second-to-last thing you want.
So when River Road Bakehouse reached out to ask if they could mail me their premium artisan breads, which were also available locally at Atlantic Superstore (!!!) I really wasn’t sure how to respond.
I decided to go for it, figuring that my kids and husband would enjoy it. After all, I was trying hard (SO HARD) to win my lifelong battle with a carbohydrate obsession. I didn’t need to try the bread personally. I could just get their perspective.
Heck, I’d even set up an Instagram account specifically dedicated to tracking my low-carb meals!
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| This is me, eating boring low-carb food. |
… Except that I’d sorta fallen off the low-carb bandwagon …
… Except that I’d stopped posting pictures of low-carb meals because they were few and far between …
… Except that I found myself once again eating bread, except it was mostly out of laziness.
***
We bought bread every week because it was permanently on the list, but we never ate it all.
My husband would bring in the new groceries, stuff everything into the cupboards and push the old mostly-used bread loaves to the back … where I’d find them, after their expiration dates, in these sad little bundles …
It was a frustrating waste, and it kept happening, but we kept buying it. No one particularly liked it or hated it — it just … was.
***
So let’s fast-forward to when the River Road Bakehouse delivery arrived. It was Total Bread Heaven Up In Here.
Angels were singing. It was epic — especially for a Carb Queen like me.
I made sandwiches. I made fancy hamburgers. I toasted baguette slices with cheese, tomatoes and garlic to make the most amazing bruschetta.
We had so much, actually, that I shared with the neighbours while it was still nice and fresh — and they loved it, too. I popped the rest into the freezer so I could warm it up when we needed it. WE WASTED NOTHING, YOU GUYS.
But best of all, I smothered slices of french bread with butter and ate them for breakfast. It had the perfect consistency — dense but still soft — where you sink your teeth into a velvety slice and think “Oh my God, how could I ever quit you, bread?”
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| My most favourite breakfast in the world. |
Carbs are not the enemy. BREAD is not the enemy — even delectable white bread, spread with real butter. And I’m not going to be the person who quits either.
What I’ve decided is that I’m done with SOME bread.
- White sandwich bread that’s $1 at the grocery store? Bye, Felicia.
- Equally blah whole-wheat bread? Nope, not gonna eat it. I don’t care if it has grains and seeds all over it.
- Bagels? Don’t care for them, so they’re out.
- Croissants? Haven’t had one in years.
- English Muffins? Only when I’m going to savour every buttery nook and cranny.
If I’m going to eat bread, it is going to be GOOD BREAD.
Soft french bread spread with butter.
Baguette rounds toasted with fresh tomatoes and garlic.
A clubhouse sandwich on a thick ciabatta bun.
River Road Bakehouse artisan breads are now available in Atlantic Superstore locations ALL across Nova Scotia. Tryyyyyyyyy them!
***
ALSO …
Just by playing the Food Waste Warrior quiz, River Road Bakehouse will donate $0.25 to the local charity of your choice.
Of course, I picked FOUND Halifax since I’ve interviewed them for a story and love what they’re doing!
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Heather's Handmade Life 