Things to Do!

The other day the girls and I were at Chandler's music program at school. Tess suddenly decided it was a bit boring and without any warning decided the playground would be more fun. So she took off. I might have caught up with her sooner but Greta was quite sick (with a fever) and cradling her made it more difficult to catch up with her than normal (even in normal circumstances it is hard because Tess is so fast). By the time we made it back to the program Tess was. not. happy. to. be. there. (I'm sure it was a nice addition to the video they were making for parents!) Thankfully a nice lady next to us offered some take home reading books she had in a bag. Life saving.

Something good came out of it all. . . .one of the books was on how to make a cardboard doll house and it grabbed Tessa's attention. She pestered me to make one. Since I didn't read the book I googled for some ideas. After gleaning ideas, here is what we came up with:

I didn't realize when we put the dolls in that the only one Tess deemed as a boy (she wanted all girls, but I told her a family needed to have a daddy) was sitting on the couch with an adoring mommy! Recipe for a happy family!

Chandler made most of the furniture--the TV, aquarium, computer and couch. He loves this kind of stuff and did a really great job with them. I so appreciated his help because I needed to get going on dinner and the girls hadn't quite had their fill on working on it yet.

-------------------------------------

With that Google search, I walked away with many links to blogs of fun things to do with my kids. After adding them to my blog roll, first on my list was finding ideas to keep little girlies quiet during conference this weekend. Here are a few of them:

(These are just links to the posts I'm using , if interested, click on the blog title to get entire blogs of fun things to do with young (or older) children.)

Puzzles. I bought some large bird & fish cut outs in the party section of Hobby Lobby to do this with. I used a floor puzzle I had to trace my pieces so they are interlocking.

Tumble Bunnies. Something I can put my boys in charge of doing and they will have as much fun with it as the girls.

Sensory bin. There are lots of sites with ideas for sensory bins, but I loved this one because once it's over, I can toss it out and I don't have to store it.

Cardboard! This site is awesome! I haven't decided what project I'll have the girls do, but whatever it is, I'm sure a few big brothers will be interested in helping. We'll be revisiting often. (Ironically, I followed the tutorial for catapult earlier last week from this site, but didn't click on the blog to see the whole thing.)

I'm still searching for more ideas so if you have some, send them my way please!