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When Mom’s out for the day and it’s raining out, boredom can ensue. Today, the wife took our daughter to a baby shower for the day, so I had the two boys. Confronted with a lousy forecast and the novelty of new Christmas toys long gone (sad, isn’t it?), I started thinking about some neat stuff to do with them instead of plopping them in front of the TV.
We considered seeing a movie but there was nothing playing that we found interesting. And that kind of defeats the purpose of avoiding a day full of television – it’s just a higher priced screen.
Bounce Places – We’ve been to a few of these for various birthday parties. Whether it’s BounceU, Kids Rule, or whatever the name of the chain is, they’re pretty much the same place. Kids take off shoes, go nuts running and bouncing through various large blow-up obstacle courses and it tires them out while Dad gets to bounce around and act like a little kid with them. That was our first stop today. For twenty bucks, we spent 90 minutes of quality time together going nuts. Today they allowed walk-ins, but some days they don’t so just find a place near you and call ahead.
Arcade -This was going to be our second choice, but the place I had in mind was closed on Sundays, so we didn’t get over there. Regardless, we don’t have games in the house (yet) and they rarely make it to an arcade so I figured this would be a fun way to spend an hour or so. Maybe next time.
In the House: Hide and Seek -There are a million things you can do in the house on a rainy day, but we rarely play hide and seek and our 3 year old absolutely loves it. It never gets old for him, even when he hides in the same spot every time! Our five year old’s getting to that competitive stage where he really tries to find crazy spots to hide. Anyway, that’s always fun for a good thirty minutes.
Arts and Crafts -My wife’s real good about stocking the house full of arts and crafts for the kids. We have an endless supply of paper, stickers, crayons, markets, glue, etc. So, we basically just wing it and throw together some ridiculous contraption and then present it to Mom when she gets home.
Bath – The Closer - So Mom doesn’t have to walk in and do a bath first thing in, I’m starting bath time now. I’ll let them splash around in there for a while and chill since I usually move things along more quickly during the week and we’re starting early. When she pops in, I can say, “They’re bathed – alright I’m gonna finally take my shower for the day after I hit the elliptical for a couple minutes” or whatever.
While a rainy day can stink since we do so much outside when it’s nice, there’s no reason to totally squander a good day with the kids. They grow up so fast, so we might as well make the most out of these individual moments when the family’s not together and we’re not in our typical routine.
What are some of your favorite Rainy Day Activites?
by MyDadBlog on January 13, 2010
in Advice
I’ve been both amused and disturbed when my 5 year old quotes me an infomercial outlining the benefits of the giant cupcake maker, the magic doorsweep or the snuggie. On one hand, it’s funny what an easy sell he is and how enthusiastic he is about a piece of crap made in China that falls apart once it arrives, but at the same time, it demonstrates just how impressionable young kids are to even small doses of commercial television.
When I was growing up, I don’t recall infomercials like this during kids’ shows. I also didn’t desire or possess much in the way of material things. While my friends were all getting the Commodore 64 and wearing expensive parachute pants, my Dad bought me cinder blocks to build a fort in the back yard and I got “practical gifts” like flashlights and pocket knives. It’s not to say I didn’t want what my friends had at the time, but I think I have a different appreciation for the receipt of gifts even today as an adult compared to friends and kids today.
This is of course, is partially a reflection on us as parents and how we’re raising our kids, but we’re pretty much mainstream, or actually, a bit on the frugal side compared to virtually everyone we know and associate with.
I tend to try and focus our spending on memorable life experiences over material things. I’m sure the kids will look back more fondly (and so will we) on a trip to Disney rather than boasting that they had a full collection of games for the Nintendo DS when they were growing up. However, with every holiday and birthday seemingly being met with gifts, gifts, gifts, it seems to diminish the thrill and appreciation of subsequent gifts. I’m often overruled by my wife, and sometimes rightly so in retrospect. But I wish on some levels that life could be simpler, easier, less wrought with chintzy crap from the dollar store. It’s not just the money, it’s the mindset that entices kids to desire more and more “stuff” regardless of its complete lack of utility or enjoyment after the first 5 minutes.
What are your thoughts?
Am I an old fart who forgot what it was like to be a kid or is this generation being subjected to vastly different consumerism than ours?
Is it me or are some parents (usually moms dictate these terms) overly rigid with their kids’ napping schedules? I don’t mean to knock moms trying to do right by their kids, because I realize that some kids are completely off the wall if they miss their nap for the day or something, but there are some parents who are so rigid with the napping timeline that it’s a little over the top.
We have some acquaintances that absolutely will not budge by even 30 minutes on plans or a get-together if it doesn’t adhere strictly to their child’s standard nap time. In one case, my wife hangs with a small mom group and when it hits 11:30, one mother abruptly packs up and jets out of there without barely saying a word. She murmurs something about Johnny’s nap time and how he can’t start late. I mean, what would happen if instead of laying him down at noon, he went down a 12:15? Does he turn into a pumpkin? The kids were having a great time and boom – end of story. No flexibility. We have another friend that won’t drive to our house during the day because their child wouldn’t get a full nap at their usual time. Meanwhile, it’s OK for us to drive to them and have the kid nap in the car or shift their nap time.
Maybe we’re just too lax or real lucky, but since we’ve had to be pretty flexible after moving and drive our kids all over the place to maintain friendships, make doctor’s appointments, hit speech lessons, etc., our kids nap times have moved around to accommodate schedules, not the other way around.
Here’s the funny part…twice per year, times shift by an hour for daylight savings. The moms have no trouble shifting a noon nap pre-daylight savings to noon post-daylight savings (a whopping 1 hour shift in the span of a day), yet they wig out at the thought of starting or ending a nap 15 minutes from the “clock” time to accommodate a particular situation.
Can someone please explain this to me?
With our kids off from school today, my wife put on a movie for the boys (5 and 3), but it wasn’t Disney and it wasn’t the usual cartoon fair. She put one of the 1-year birthday videos I made for each sons just prior to their first birthday. Even after seeing it several times, the kids still love watching their videos (and each other) and there’s just something “authentic” or heartwarming about watching them reminisce about being smaller and how silly we were with them and what it was like being a baby. Without patting myself on the back too much (because I’m totally deficient in so many other facets of fatherhood and husbandry), I’m really glad I took the time and energy to put together these videos for the kids and I’ll have to do the same for our daughters as well, now 7 months.
Background: Throughout each of our kids’ first year, like many families, the video camera was on all the time and we took plenty of snapshots. Now, that’s normally where it stops. Most families have countless hours of video of their child’s first feeding, first roll, first steps, first word, etc., but it never gets put to good use – perhaps a YouTube vid forwarded to family members if anything. Well, for whatever reason, leading up to our son’s first birthday, I was inspired enough to hunker down and spend probably 20-30 hours total split across a few weeks uploading and editing about 15 hours of video I had captured from his first year. I figured out how to use some standard video editing software rather quickly and easily, tried out a few digital tricks, and I was on my way! I’ve used Pinnacle and the Microsoft Movie Editing software for videos now.
I added several of our best shots and then envisioned a theme for the video. I basically went through each major holiday and milestone, inserted video and pics, made sure to include all the family members I could muster up, and put music to the different sections. These days, with massive archives of personal music and iTunes, it’s easy to get say, Christmas music for a winter section or a scary song for Halloween, etc.
At each first birthday party, with the whole family there, we put the video on and watched it together for the first time. People were completely blown away and loved it. Many, including my wife, cried at the end when I cycled back through the first year and said, “Kev’s growing up”. I had one wedding planner ask me if I wanted to start doing videos for weddings. It’s not that I had any great talent at all, nor did I have any prior experience. It’s just that nobody takes the time to do this. But, since this will be something our kids (and us) have forever, the grueling weeks of 1-2 hours a night in the basement toiling away at uploads and editing were well worth it.
Lessons Learned
Now that I’m about to start editing my third one, I’ve learned some important lessons I’d like to impart:
- Don’t get so wrapped up in perfectionism and editing each frame to perfectly coincide with a musical queue, digital tricks, etc. This will end up taking up 80% of your time for only marginal benefit. I learned this the hard way on my first video.
- Don’t keep watching your partial video hundreds of times throughout the editing process. This wastes valuable time and drains your energy/creativity along the way.
- Do batch processing. Download ALL the video at once, just let the tape run, record on your hard drive and go in and edit later. This is much quicker than what I did the first time, which was to watch little bits and pieces on the camera and then decide to upload little snippets for inclusion in the video.
- DON’T MAKE YOUR VIDEO TOO LONG!!!…Especially if you want anyone else to watch it. My first one was probably 30 minutes, second one 25. I might make the next one 20 or so. When you pop on a video for a party or perhaps another couple who’s thinking of doing the same thing, they don’t want to sit through a 3 hour compilation of every little thing you’ve captured. I was at one party where someone put on a video which was practically an unedited running stream of 45 minutes of less than gripping video. Everyone felt imprisoned and couldn’t just get up and leave but you could tell everyone was annoyed. It’s much more effective for both immediate effect and subsequent viewing to have a nice story to tell – break up themes, and keep it relatively watchable.
Most Importantly – Just Do It! Upon reading this, you may be one of the millions of moms or dads out there with hours and hours of footage and thousands of beautiful pictures just sitting on a hard drive or tapes somewhere. Take the time and effort to chip away at this in a methodical fashion and your kids will love you for it.
