We saw this recent post at the New England Mamas site about Friday Night Family Fun ideas. We really liked the idea of Diner Night so we thought we would share their post with you.

Here are some of our archived posts on Friday Night Fun Activities with even more tips and ideas on how to plan some creative, wacky quality time with your kids:

What is your favorite way to spend quality time with the kids on a Friday Night?

Today is a very special day for us for two reasons. First, it’s my son’s birthday. He turned 10 and is in the double digits now. Scary. In 6 more years he is going to be driving and he still can’t tie his shoes properly! I guess we need to hunker down and look into finding a shoe-tying tutor.

We have a tradition in our house where we set up our kids “guys” or “animals” at the table on the morning of their birthday. Their toys wish them a Happy Birthday and the kids love it. This morning, Star Wars Clones and Jedi wished him a Happy Birthday, while guarding his precious birthday chocolate donut.

Today is also a great day because it is National Chocolate Cake Day which for us, is on the same level as Halloween or Valentine’s Day. You know, a day to be celebrated … heavily, and with lots of ooey gooey treats!

Here’s our new favorite recipe for Molten Chocolate Cake, that we found over at the Pioneer Woman site.

Have a favorite recipe for Chocolate Cake or a fun way to celebrate this all important day? Please share! May your day be filled with Chocolate Cake Moments.

A few weeks ago I was on NBC 5 Chicago News talking about ways to keep kids busy during the Holiday Break, with some sanity saver ideas and cool products. While the Holiday Break may be over, check out the clip and use the ideas to have fun with your kids, especially on snow days or the upcoming Presidents Day Holiday weekend. Leave me a comment if you like the segment and check out some of my other videos on my YouTube Channel (the content is good, even if my head is cut off in some of them.)

Video on How to Amuse Kids During Holiday Break.

As a personal aside, I want to throw out a big thank you to Nesita Kwan and the morning news crew at NBC 5 Chicago for making me feel so welcome and at ease while I was in the studios. It was a pleasure! Thank you as well for allowing us to post the video clip.

Would you be interested in seeing some of our tips and ideas on Family Fun in video form?

The ladies over at Cool Mom Picks have put together some great information on how we can donate money to the Haitian relief effort. But, here’s another way to help, and best yet, you can involve your children. Have them go around the house and gather up all of their shoes that no longer fit and send them to Soles4Souls. They are trying to get as many gently-worn shoes to the people of Haiti, as possible. You can enter your zip code at the Soles4Souls website to find the nearest drop-off location or find other ways to get your gently used shoes in their hands and then onto a Haitian child’s feet.

It’s a great opportunity to help those in need, talk to your kids about helping others, and clean out the closet. It’s a Win/Win/Win in my book!

For info on worthy charity sites to make donations or get more info on the shoe collection program, check out the post at Cool Mom Picks.

My kids have both today and tomorrow off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day It’s 10 a.m. and they are bored already. So, I came up with a list of 10 things we could do today together or they could do by themselves while I work for a few hours. I’m going to let them pick their activities but thought I would share my list with you. I hope it helps!

1. Make Valentine’s Day Cards. Everyone loves a handmade Valentine’s Day Card, especially Grandma and Grandpa. Give them kids some construction paper, lace, glitter, stickers and whatever else inspires them to create a masterpiece of love. If you still need ideas, check out these from Family Fun Magazine, Kaboose, or Amazing Moms

2. Movie Marathon. Let the kids stay in their pajamas and pick a theme for a movie marathon. Let each member of the family pick a movie and then make popcorn, bake cookies, or set up an ice cream sundae bar for some extra special movie treats.

3. Go Sledding. If you can round up enough kids in the neighborhood, throw a sledding party.

4. Make a Holiday Scrapbook. Take all of those Christmas or Hanukkah pictures you just took and have each child decorate a page to be put in a scrapbook. Everyone will love looking at it next Holiday season.

5. Stage a Wii Olympics Tournament. If you have a Wii, this is a fun way to get the kids interested in the upcoming Winter Olympics. Play Wii Ski, Snowboard, or Mario vs. Sonic Winter Olympics Games. If you don’t have them, go rent them at your local video store.

6. Melt some Crayons, Make some Art. We recently came across this craft idea at the From Dates to Diapers blog. Looks like fun.

7. Bake Cookies. Let each child choose their favorite cookie recipe and have fun in the kitchen baking together. My kids love Peanut Butter Blossoms. This isn’t a cookie but these Hot Chocolate Mug Cakes are easy and fun to make on a cold day.

8. Host a Tea Party. Get out your pretty hats, scarves, jewelry, tea set, pretty napkins, and invite your child’s friends or stuffed animal friends to join you for a spot of tea. Have your kids decorate the table and serve cookies and “tea” aka root beer for the kids.

9. Have an Indoor Snowball Fight. Create “snowball” ammunition out of white tissue paper or cotton balls wrapped with saran wrap. Give each team an equal amount. Let ‘em fight it out in the basement or other kid-friendly area of the house. Of course, you can do this outside with real snowballs but if the kids are too cold or the snow isn’t “snowball friendly”, then this is a fun way to bring an outdoor activity inside.

10. Puzzles, Games, or Art Kits. This is the perfect day to “rediscover” some games, puzzles, or art or model kits that have been sitting in the closet ignored. Clear a space for the kids at a table and bring out these forgotten items which will seem like new gifts to the kids.

If the kids are still bored, tell them that they are old enough to learn to clean the bathroom, so let’s get started. I’m sure you will see a renewed interest in the other ideas.

Have any cool ideas for how to amuse the kids on days when they are home from school? Please share!

We’ve been speaking about Family Pizza Night and Kids Pizza Parties in the past few blog posts, so I thought it was kizmet when I got an email from the Kohl’s Children’s Museum on their new exhibit – Pizza Any Way You Slice It!.

It opens this Monday, January 18th so I haven’t seen it yet but it looks like a lot of fun. Who wouldn’t love an exhibit about pizza? The exhibit focuses on using pizza to teach math concepts like fractions and recipe measurements, so I think it will have appeal for older kids. This might be a perfect outing for either Monday or Tuesday next week when the kids are off for school for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Click here for a $2 discount off of the Admission Price for every member of the family.

Here’s the Museum exhibit description:

Learn the basics of math with an incredibly popular food…pizza! Pizza: Any Way You Slice It! encourages playful, open-ended exploration by focusing on three areas: making, delivering and eating pizza. Children are instantly drawn to this exhibit that informally teaches counting, sorting, measuring, gathering, matching, patterning, sequencing, role-playing and sharing.

If you child loved making and playing with pizza, then check out the Wooden Pizza Party Toy, over at our sister site, the Chocolate Cake Club.

Come back next week and let me and others know what you think of the exhibit.

Moms, need a little help getting the paperwork chaos monster under control this year? Have a New Years resolution to actually see your kitchen counters? Are the schools sending home more and more papers just to freak yo out? (Maybe that’s just me.) Regardless, we can help.

Download our FREE Guide to Organizing the Paperwork Chaos. It’s another Chocolate Cake Moments guide I’ve written with tips and ideas on how to get control of the mail that multiplies, not let the school paperwork bully you into submission, and keep your counters paperwork free. (So that you can pile other stuff on them, but that’s a different story.) My husband and I would play this game to see how long it takes before an empty chair or clear counter top gets used as a storage surface. It was sad how quickly we lost the game. So, I wrote this guide to help us get a process or system in place to get some control back. We may not be winning every time, but we keep trying and it helps. We strongly feel that getting organized and not feeling stressed about the clutter in your house will free you up for more Chocolate Cake Moments and fun with your family.

Download the guide here – Organize the Paperwork Chaos

If you like our guide, feel free to share it with anyone. Good luck. What are some of your tips for keeping household paperwork at bay?

We promised to share our killer Homemade Pizza Recipe so you and your family can make pizza for some Friday Night Family Fun or host a Pizza Party. If you have a standing mixer, the dough is super easy to make. If not, it just takes a little muscle power to knead the dough. We love crispy crust so for this recipe we use a pizza stone. You could certainly use this dough in a pizza pan as well, but you’ll have to watch to see when it’s done. The dough comes out a little softer in a pan.

Warning: This is one of those family tradition recipes that isn’t really writen down but we have developed over several years of practice. I’ve tried to write it as exact as I can, but you might just need to eyeball some things and add your own touch.

Pizza Dough:
3 cups flour
1 pkg. yeast
1 cup warm water
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 egg
1/2 tsp. corn meal, extra corn meal for rolling dough

Pizza Sauce:
1 16 oz. can of tomato sauce
1 6 oz. can of tomato paste
2-3 Tbsp. dried oregano
2 tsp. onion salt
2 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. dried basil

Cheeses:
1 lb. low-fat Mozzarella cheese
1 lb. Mexican Chihuahua cheese
Parmesan cheese

Note: Since low-fat Mozzarella cheese has lost it’s flavor and doesn’t brown nicely, we mix it with Mexican Chihuahua cheese. The Chihuahua cheese melts nicer, is a little saltier, and browns up great! If you can’t find it, mix in whole milk Mozzarella or just use the low-fat Mozzarella. It will taste good, just not brown up as nicely.

1. Dissolve package of yeast in warm water in a small bowl. Mix well.

2. In a large bowl or standing mixer bowl, add all of the dry ingredients and mix well.

3. Make an island in the center of the dry ingredients and add the egg, yeast and vegetable oil. Knead dough thoroughly with a standing mixer or your hands. (Use the bread hook attachment on your standing mixer and this is a breeze. You can turn it on and walk away. However, don’t overknead the dough. 3 – 4 minutes is all that is needed.)

4. Let the dough rise in the bowl for at least 10 minutes or set aside if you are going to make a double batch. Put pizza stone in the oven, sprinkle a little corn meal on the stone, and heat to 500 degrees. (The hotter the stone, the crispier the crust. Don’t be afraid to let it really heat up.)

5. Divide the dough into 3-5 balls to make individual pizzas. We can usually get 2 or 3 adult-size 12″ pizzas and 2 smaller 9″ kids-sized out of one batch of dough.

6. Sprinkle some flour on your rolling pin and sprinkle corn meal on a flat surface. Roll out the dough as thin as you like into a circle (or as close to a circle as you can get.) The dough will snap back a little when you go to pick it up and move it. That’s OK but if it snaps back too much, you need to roll it out a little more and make the dough less elastic.

7. Place the circle of dough on a pizza paddle or a large cutting board that has been sprinkled with corn meal. Before you start putting the toppings on, gently shake it back and forth to make sure that the dough isn’t sticking and will easily slide off.

8. Spoon on the tomato sauce, use as much as you like. Add the toppings and cheese. Sprinkle a little parmesan on at the last minute and slide the pizza into the oven on the stone.

9. Bake for 8-10 minutes or when the cheese turns golden. Mangia!

Here are our favorite Pizza Topping Ideas:
My son: Sausage
My husband: Sausage, mushroom, onion and green pepper
My daughter: Cheese, please
Me: Goat cheese, sliced fresh basil, plum tomatoes, freshly shaved parmesan

If you are looking for something a little more exotic, we also like:
Taco Pizza – taco seasoned ground beef, tomato sauce or taco sauce, monterey jack and cheddar cheeses, (after baking garnish with shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, black olives, sour cream, and crushed Doritos)
Hawaiian Pizza – canadian bacon and pineapple tidbits
Swiss and Onion Pizza – This is a great appetizer. Carmelize onions. Brush pizza crust with rosemary flavored olive oil, put slices of swiss cheese and carmelized onions on top. Yummy!

What are some of your favorite pizza toppings?

We are so excited that our kitchen remodeling is going to be done this week, after several long months! Yippee, Hurray, and Thank Goodness! To celebrate, we asked the kids what they wanted to make as their first meal in our new kitchen. The overwhelming response was “Homemade Pizza!” My choice would have been beef tenderloin stuffed with goat cheese in a cabarnet wine sauce, but so be it. Believe it or not my kids would eat the beef tenderloin heartily, but pizza is more fun to make.

Making pizza is a tradition that my parents started and we have continued with our family. I know my brother has started this tradition with his family, as well. We have a killer recipe for homemade pizza and the kids just love rolling the dough, choosing their toppings, and eating a pizza that they made themselves. It’s family bonding time at its best – we put on the dance tunes and groove while we cook, we talk about upcoming vacations, or we watch a new movie together.

Still not convinced to put away the take-out menu this Friday Night and cook? Here’s 7 reasons why Homemade Pizza Night should be in your arsenal of Family Fun Ideas. (I’m sure I could come up with more than 7, but that’s the limit of my creativity today.)

1. You get to bond and talk with your kids or grandkids while cooking. (Priceless!)

2. You can multi-task by dancing, entertaining, watching a movie, or playing a game while you cook. (So, great for us ADD people.)

3. The pizza is super-tasty, you get to experiment with ingredients, and you can control the freshness of the ingredients. (If it didn’t taste good I wouldn’t recommend it.)

4. You are teaching them a life skill. (Sure, cooking in general is a life skill but I think making homemade pizza is one of the ESSENTIAL life skills.)

5. Homemade pizza is a casual and fun way to entertain. We love to invite another family over when we make homemade pizza, because all of the kids get such a kick out of cooking together. The parents like it, too. (Start inviting people.)

6. Since everyone stands in the kitchen during a party anyway, you may as well put the guests to work while they are there. (Free labor? Count me in.)

7. It’s a reason to use that pizza stone or pizza pan you got when you were married and have never used. (Please dust it off before using.)

If you are going to watch a movie this Friday night while making pizza, we suggest some cooking themed movies: The newly released Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the classic Ratatouille, or if your kids are older, Mystic Pizza, Julie and Julia, or Big Night. (We don’t receive any commission from Amazon on these movie links. At least, not until we figure out how to do it. These links are purely to make your life a little easier if you want to buy the movies.)

We do sell Kids Pizza Baking Kits and the new Pizza Party Kits over at www.ChocolateCakeClub.com, to make this even easier for you. You’ll have everything you need except the cheese and extra toppings. We even have an Alien Pizza Making Kit where the sauce is purple and the dough turns green.

If you have invited some friends over for your pizza party, let the kids make their pizza first and the adults can eat a salad while they are waiting. The fun of a pizza party is standing or sitting around in the kitchen and just talking and muching the night away. While one pizza is cooking in the oven, another person can be making theirs. If you have two ovens, this goes much quicker. When a new pizza comes out of the oven, everyone will be ready to try a new piece.

Check back tomorrow for our killer recipe for Homemade Pizza. If you have a recipe you’d like to share, please do so!

Over the Holiday Break, we took the kids to see the new Addams Family Musical. Before going, we searched everywhere online to see if the play was family friendly but we found no information. Granted it was the premiere of the play so there weren’t a lot of reviews out there, but I thought we found find something on whether it was suitable for kids or not. All we saw was a blurb on the general story – Wednesday is 18 and falls in love for the first time with a “normal” boy. The Addams Family invites the boy’s family for dinner and hilarity ensues.

So, we went for it as a family Holiday treat.

On one hand, the price of the tickets sort of excludes children. It is an expensive outing to take the whole family to see any Broadway quality play. However, as I said, we wanted to do something special during Holiday Break, our friends could get us great tickets and we could go together, my husband and I fondly remember the Addams Family from our youth, and our kids have finally reached an age where they won’t get freaked out when the theater gets loud or dark or totally embarrass us by kicking seats, demanding snacks, or pointing things out during the play. (”Look Mom, there’s a guy back there!”)

The play, it turns out, is not really suitable for children. The play focuses a lot on sex and a lot of the humor, especially in the first half, is sexual innuendo. Fortunately, it went over my kids’ heads so they focused on the singing, dancing and especially the slapstick comedy so … they LOVED it! They loved Nathan Lane’s enthusiastic portrayal of Gomez, especially his sword fighting. He was fabulously funny for adults and children. (”Mom, he’s the voice of Timon!”) Bebe Neuwirth fit the part of Morticia perfectly but the real stars of the show for the kids were Uncle Fester and Grandma, played by Kevin Chamberlin and Jackie Hoffman. They loved Uncle Fester falling in love with the moon and the way they were able to fake him flying on stage was truly magical. And, when Grandma asks to be spanked at the dinner table the adults and the kids were laughing their heads off … for different reasons … but who cares. The kids loved the monster under the bed scene and I misted up when Bebe sang the Second Banana song about Mom’s stepping back to let their children shine. The set design was incredible, as well.

Our kids weren’t the only ones in the theater that night so I was glad that we weren’t the only adventurous parents. We did have to “educate” the kids on who the Addams Family was – yet another generational gap. We went to the library and found some old tapes of the Addams Family TV show before we went so they would recognize some of the characters.

Bottomline, even though my kids loved it and we truly had a Chocolate Cake Moment together as a family, I would recommend getting a babysitter and go with some friends. You’ll enjoy the play a lot more if you aren’t cringing and wondering if the kids understood that joke.

Here are some additional reviews on the Addams Family Musical.