A mama with ideas...

After living in Texas for 3 years, I like to think I have embraced the lifestyle! And one thing I have come to appreciate well is the charms of a classic frozen Margarita! I always thought I hated tequila... thanks to awful drinking games with neat cheap tequila back in my student days... but have been won over by this very popular cocktail here in the US. Apparently, the key is to get tequila made from 100% agave as this is the best indication that you are looking at a quality liquor. These spirits were produced using only fermented and distilled agave juice with water, whereas, cheaper tequilas use other sugars in the process. This is really the most important thing to look for - the rest is a matter of opinion. I was told if you stick to 100% agave tequila, you won't get a hangover, but I'm yet to test that theory!!!

The problem is that to recreate a classic frozen Margarita at home requires an ice blender (which I don't possess). It is also difficult to make in large batches, say for a party, unless you invest in a very expensive frozen Margarita machine (which I also don't possess). So, I tried a bit of an experiment and thought I would share the fabulous results!





You will need:

- Blanco Tequila (preferrably 100% agave)
- Tequila mix (either shop bought ready mix as I did, or the ingredients from your favourite Margarita recipe)
- A volume of water equal to the amount of ice (if melted) you would add to the margarita recipe before blending
- A freezer-proof container with a lid







I used a large plastic tub that can hold 7 cups volume (approx 1.65 litres). I then simply created a mix using the following ratios:

- 1 part tequila
- 3 parts tequila mix
- 3 parts water




Then simply put the lid on and stick the tub in the freezer overnight.  Take the tub out of the freezer about an hour before your guests arrive and using a fork mix up the ice and break up any larger chunks (it will have the consistency of quite hard slushy ice).










By the time your guests arrive it will have the perfect slushy consistency and can simply be ladled into your margarita glasses ... garnish with salt on the rims if you like and a fresh squeeze of lime! Store the tub in the fridge and it will stay slushy for several hours!







Super easy and delicious! Enjoy!

1. Get prepared in advance

Do your research now, while the little blighters are still at school! Look up local attractions and events calendars (try your local newspaper's website, local parks, libraries, cinemas etc...) so that you can plan a schedule of things to do in advance! Use a paper diary/calendar, use your calendar on your smartphone, or create one in Microsoft Publisher. Put together a calendar of events for your family, even if it's only a loose schedule. It gives you things to look forward to and to plan around.

Also, consider putting together a 'Ready To Go' bag! See the blog I wrote on this last summer.




2. Set a routine, and stick to it... sometimes at least

The temptation may be to let things slide. Lay-ins in the morning, late nights, mooching around and skipping chores are a wonderful prospect when you and the kids are exhausted getting towards the end of the school semester, but in my experience, too many unstructured days are a recipe for disaster. Try to have a flexible routine. Perhaps a later start in the morning, but still an expectation to be up, dressed and ready for action by a certain time! You could set aside certain times of the day for specific activities... for example, outdoor activities in the morning before it gets too hot, and then maybe, quiet time activities for an hour after lunch. Also, have set days of the week for certain activities, e.g. Monday is library day, Tuesday is for baking (you can incorporate a trip to the grocery store before hand and get the kids to help with the shopping for ingredients), Wednesday is for playdates, Thursday is Movie Day, etc...! Kids and adults benefit from structure and without it, the 100 days of summer hols become a haze!




3. Home school

Yes. You did read that right! Two and a half months off will undo a lot of the progress your child will have made academically if they don't utilise their little brains. Set aside a 30 minute chunk of the day (maybe at a regular time slot ... see point 2 above) to do some school work. It doesn't have to be dull as dishwater and can be fun! Try educational puzzles and games, video games, online resources and activity packs. Just a little bit of educational activity a day (especially if it revises stuff they have been doing at school) and it will keep their brains limber ready for the start of the new academic year. Just make sure you start as you mean to go on. If it's part of a daily routine established at the start of the school holiday there will be fewer complaints!

Check out these great workbooks and video games.


4. Play dates and reciprocal babysitting

Before the last day of school, exchange contact details with some of your child's classmates' parents. Take the initiative and organise a park play date for the first week off school with a few families and then organise a schedule with the other parents for the weeks ahead! You could even take the play date thing one step further. If you have friends with children a similar age you could set up a weekly play date swap. This enables each parent to have some well-deserved child-free time to run errands or just relax. For example, you could arrange for your children to go to a friend's house for a few hours on a Tuesday and then return the favour looking after their kids on a Thursday. The kids have friend's to play with (and so pester you less) and you get a few hours to yourself each week. Everyone's a winner!




5. Themes & projects

You could set a weekly theme and base all your activities around that theme. For example, you could have a farm theme... visit a farm park with another family, plant some vegetable seeds, bake a carrot cake, do some garden themed literacy/numeracy/art activities and etc... You could get each child to keep a summer holiday scrapbook, keeping photos, mementos and artwork from each week together.

6. Bribery

When all else fails and the kids are driving you crazy, don't feel bad about resorting to bribery! Just be sensible about it. Try using charts where the kids have to work towards getting a reward. Set out your expectations clearly first and agree the reward in advance. Think outside the box when it comes to a reward. You could treat the kids to a frozen yoghurt after a trip to the park on a Friday afternoon for good behaviour throughout the week rather than a monetary amount, candy or material object. Stick to your guns though, and only reward the behaviour that has been asked for! For more ideas check out my earlier post which includes a printable LEGO reward chart I created.

7. Camps

Summer camps can be really expensive, especially if you have more than one child. However, they can be a good option, especially for older kids with specific interests.




8. Low-cost options

If you have more than one child, summer camps can become cumulatively and prohibitively expensive. Short of picking your favourite child and only allowing that one to attend a camp, you could limit them to one week each, or just avoid them completely and come up with your own low-cost activities. This can be especially fun if you join up with other families. Suggestions:

- Use your local library - and not just for borrowing books. Many have free story times and activity classes you can sign up for.

- Local businesses sometimes have free kids' activities: Lowes DIY stores have a free build-and-grow scheme where kids can do building projects, Barnes & Noble hold free story times and etc...

- Parks - are a brilliant option. Many have play equipment, even splash pads, suitable for a wide range of ages. They also often have restrooms and picnic facilities... great for a change of scenery when the kids are driving you crazy, and even better when you meet friends for a play date!

- Museums and galleries sometimes have free days. Do your research ahead of time (see point one)!

- Cinemas often run a summer program of matinees for low cost. They won't be new releases, but you can see family favourites for just a few bucks! Treat the kids to some popcorn to make it a special (low-cost) occasion!

- Visit the dollar store and select some art supplies for a project.

- Get an annual pass to a favourite local attraction. For example, you can buy a family pass a local zoo for about $80 and visit as many times as you like throughout the holidays!

- Create a den or pitch a tent in the backyard (or in the house if the weather is bad)!

- Visit the beach, local nature reserve, woodland or river and get closer to nature!

- Try geo-caching to make walks and bike rides more exciting!

- Volunteer - find a local food bank, nursing home, or animal shelter and spend some of your summer holiday doing something worthwhile with your kids!

9. Remember... it's a holiday!

After a full-on academic year, you and the kids will need some time to relax. Don't try to fill every moment with activities or you will end up exhausted and needing to go back to school for a break. It's okay to have days with nothing planned. Let (insist) the kids play on their own sometimes... it's important that children learn to use their own imaginations and initiative. Trot out that really annoying line that your own parents used: "Only boring people get bored"! It's not true of course, but sometimes a little boredom is unavoidable and you should not feel obliged to entertain the troops continually!

10. Drink...

After a particularly stressful day with the kids... treat yourself to a glass of wine once they've gone to bed and remember the holidays won't last forever!

One look at Pinterest will give you a gazillion fancy-pants ideas for Lego themed parties... from beautiful party favours to amazing cakes, you will see it all and more! I had a good go at replicating some of these ideas and even came up with a few of my own.








However, one thing I often struggle to find when planning a party is ideas for games & activities outside the normal pinata and pin-the-tail-on-the-BLANK type of things. This is especially tricky the older the kids become as they begin to get quite discerning. While a bunch of 4 year olds will happily entertain themselves with a few hours of side-by-side playing, older kids can easily get quite raucous and need something a bit more challenging!

This was the case recently, when the Big One asked for a Lego themed party for his 8th birthday. To be honest, I was hoping that as he approached his tweens I would be able to get away with taking a few of his close friends to the cinema or something similarly 'grown up' but he was insistent he wanted a party. I was pleased to indulge him as this will probably be the last big 'party' for him at home until he wants to illicitly invite a load of unwashed hooligan teenagers around to ours for a bit of underage drinking and general carnage (he will live to regret it if he tries it) or for a milestone like his 18th birthday!

After a bit of thinking I came up with the following party activities and games and they were a resounding success and perfect for the 6-10 age group.

First of all a tip: Assign each child a yellow square paper plate (with a Lego face drawn and their name written on it with permanent marker). This is their plate for the entire party to store things on, so it should be kept somewhere safe.




Activity 1 - Fast Build Contest
Lego frequently produces promotional sets in plastic bags. They are often sold next to the tills in places like Target and are inexpensive (around $4-5 each). Buy enough of the same set for each child attending the party (try ebay if you're struggling to get multiple sets the same)... they can double as a party favour for the child to take home! Cut the tops off every bag and place on their plate without tipping out the contents. Sit the children on the floor with their plate in front of them. Blow a whistle to commence the Fast Build race... the children tip the bag contents onto their plate and assemble the model from the instructions. The winning child is the one who builds the model (accurately) the quickest!

Activity 2 - L-Egg-Oh! Tower Team Contest
For this activity you will need to prepare in advance a bag of Legos for each team (a set of plain building blocks like the one below is useful for this). For the sake of fairness, you may wish to make sure that each team has the same number/variety of blocks. Divide the children into groups (3-4 children per group). You may wish to sort out the groups in advance to a) get the right mix of personalities, b) avoid arguments and c) prevent someone from feeling left out! Give each group a bag of Legos and space them out on the floor. Giving each group a tray will help to contain the spread of Legos as well! The challenge is for the groups to build a tower from blocks that can support an (uncooked) egg. The group with the tallest tower wins, although you may want to hand out additional prizes for the best 'teamwork'!
















Activity 3 - Lego Derby Car Team Contest
You can either stick with the same groups or mix the kids up into new teams. You can use the same bags of Lego, but make sure that each bag contains some wheels/axles. Set up a gravity racetrack (similar to that used in Pinewood Derby). I used Hot Wheels track pieces to create two long race tracks side by side and clamped them onto a ledge using the G-clamps. The challenge for each team is to design a Derby Car from Legos. When the cars are completed, take it in turn to race them until a winner is declared! You can also hand out additional prizes for 'coolest car design' or 'teamwork'!












Prize Ideas
Candy is always welcomed by kids, but you can jazz things up a bit by making it into a 'prize'! I used thin (1" x 8") cellophane bags to create 'tubes' of Lego candy, and then printed Lego heads to create toppers which I cut out and glued in place to seal the end and cover the staple at the top.








I also create Lego trophies by gluing a Lego 2x2 flat tile on the front of a plastic trophy with a hot glue gun! You could also use medals!







Happy party planning!

My kids are no different to many others, in that they have an inability to hang the hand towel back up when they have washed their hands! It is often to be found damp, and scrunched up on the counter...




...on the stool...




...or, even on the floor!




It is something that easily adds to the untidiness that creeps up unannounced every day in my house. How it happens in such a short period of time, I'll never know! One minute, peace reigneth and everything is in its proper place. Then, BOOM!... you blink, and everything that's not bolted down has been strewn across the house. Sigh.

And therein lies the solution to the problem. If the towel was literally 'bolted down' it could not be dumped on the counter/floor!

You will need...

• a wall-mounted towel rail
• a hand towel
• 2 x sew on snap fasteners
• cotton in a coordinating colour to your towel and a needle

Fold a portion of the towel up.  You may wish to measure this on your towel rail so that there is enough room for the towel to hang and still be used.




Sew the 'male' halves of the snap fasteners to two corners of one of the short sides of the towel.







Line up the 'female' halves of the fasteners so that they are level with each other at the point you folded the towel to.  Sew them on.




Drape the towel over the rail and snap the fasteners together.







Done.

You can then easily remove the towel for laundering but it stays put while the kids dry their hands!  If you'd rather, you could use sew-on velcro instead! 

The Chubby Cheeks One is four, and a reluctant writer. In fact, he's a reluctant artist too and is just the sort of kid that would rather be playing active games than sitting practising early learning skills like holding a pencil, using scissors or learning to write his name. It's not that he doesn't enjoy school (he loves it) - he knows his 'wetters' [sic], loves books, singing and many of the other activities at pre-school. He just does not particularly enjoy trying to write. Apparently, it's not just with me either. His pre-school teacher has made a few comments about his refusal to participate in these types of activities (he often politely tells her "I just can't do it") and it's something she would like us to work on with him.

I'm sure that some of it is just that innate competitive boy thing... if it's something I'm not instantly good at, I don't want to know!!! I am very familiar with this attitude from dealing with the Big One (soon to be 8... eeek!) who is very motivated by instant success and is not good at persevering with activities that take practise to master. He will never be a musician for this reason!

But we have been trying to encourage our youngest to be more interested in learning penmanship, and I thought I would share some of the better resources we have come across.


Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici/www.freedigitalphotos.net 

TRADITIONAL WORKBOOKS
I purchased some of the Kumon series of workbooks aimed at preschoolers on the recommendation of a friend. I was a little skeptical as to whether my boys would be interested at all in something so 'school-like' and traditional, but was actually pleasantly surprised. The "My First Book of Tracing" workbook (click on the picture below for more information) was higher quality than I was expecting. In fact, the first thing the Chubby Cheeks One said was: "I'm not supposed to draw on books, just paper". The workbook pages are thick with colorful illustrations and very different to the worksheets he is familiar with from school. The activities themselves start out very easy and I was initially concerned that the level was not going to be challenging enough. However, the instant successes from the 'easy' early pages really gave my little one a confidence boost so that he was keen to continue. In fact, I had to rein him in a little or he would have raced through the whole book in one go! The activities become harder and more complex as the book goes on and do require greater concentration and dexterity. Overall, I was very pleased with this activity book and have ordered others since. They are particularly useful as a short 5-10 minute quiet activity.

To assist with his pen holding, I bought some pencils with a triangular shaped body to help him develop the correct grip.

APPS
Him Indoors loves his technology & gadgets and this is something that all three of my boys have inherited along with their Y-chromosome! Getting to use Daddy's iPad is a rare treat in our house and one that we have not encouraged. I worry that the kids have too much screen time as it is, without adding another source! However, now that the twins are 4, I wondered whether they might find the prospect of being able to use Daddy's iPad a motivation to practise their writing skills! First things, first. An iPad is an expensive 'toy' and like all kids, ours are known for their occasional clumsiness! So we invested in a protective case for the device. There are many cases designed with kids in mind, but we chose the M-Edge Supershell Case. We chose this one over the rest because of several reasons. Firstly, the design of this case allows access to all the ports without removing it, so you can use headphones with it on (something I was keen to have for when travelling)! You can also easily adjust the volume buttons through the foam. The foam itself is dense and protective, fitting very snugly. However, it isn't so bulky or cumbersome that an adult wouldn't want to use it too. Click on the image below for more information.

We also invested in chunky stylus with a triangular shape like the pencils above. While not cheap, I felt it was worth the investment as practising using a 'pen' was the point of the activity rather than just a fingertip. Again, click on the image to find out more.

With the hardware sorted, we were able to download a couple of 'games' for the boys to try. I used the very useful website, Commonsense Media, to lookup apps with good reviews. You can search for games by device (iPad, Kindle, iPhone etc...), by age, and by skill or topic. You can then read reviews and decide which one you like before downloading. Very handy! Click here for their app search!

My kids' favourite app for tracing has got to be the Little Writer app by Alligator Apps (Innovative Mobile Apps Ltd). The music is appealing but not grating. The game encourages the kids to trace the letters by following a trail of themed dots (so if the background is the ocean, they follow fish)! The activities include writing uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and shapes. But the game the boys enjoy the most is the one where they get to write basic words. If they trace the letters C-A-T carefully and correctly, they are rewarded with a picture of a cat! The only thing I wish it would do in this activity is sound out the letters phonically (rather than by name) as they are writing them so that the kids can start to make the connection between the sound a letter makes and the word being written. However, for the purpose of practising using a pen and writing letters this app is great and my little ones love it!

PRINTABLES
One of the things we have been asked to work on with our twins is getting them to write their names independently. The Shouty One has pretty much mastered this and can independently write his name correctly. We are still working on it with the Chubby Cheeks One and I was delighted to find a free resource online that allowed you to create and print your own traceable worksheets. At www.kidzone.ws you can select whether you want block, script or cursive font and input the text you want the child to practise writing... once submitted a custom printable is created! So easy!

How do you encourage your reluctant writer?!