Top 10 Fall Family Fun Activities

September 21st, 2011 · 4 Comments

Yeah, today is the first official day of Autumn! Unfortunately we don’t have any leaves to jump into yet to celebrate but this is my family’s favorite time of year. The weather is cooler, the trees look beautiful as they say goodbye for the year, we break out the spooky Halloween and Day of the Dead decorations, it’s Hawkeye football season, and we go gaga for Apple Cider Donuts. (Man, I love a good donut.)

To make sure we don’t miss out on a minute of favorite seasonal fun activities, we create a Fall Family Fun Plan or a bucket list of activities we want to do this Fall. We pick a night and at dinner everyone throws out ideas of what they want to do and we then schedule our activities on the calendar. We now know if we need to buy tickets to anything, get invitations out, or have the house clean by a certain date. (Oh yes, our social calendar dictates when the house gets cleaned.) Once our activities are written in stone (OK, just in the planner – but in PEN!) we have some fun times to look forward to.

Below you’ll see a list of my family’s favorite activities to have fun in the Fall. Most of these ideas are inexpensive and get you outside enjoying the crisp Autumn air. For more inspiration as you create your Family Fun Plan, check your local park districts, libraries, YMCAs, and Children’s Museums for family specific fall events coming up in your area.

Top 10 Ideas for Fall Family Fun

I’ll be writing more this Fall on how to have the most fun doing any one of these fun activities so check back often.

We found this article at the DomesticCents.com blog on Frugal Fall Family Fun Ideas that we wanted to share. I love their photos and Scarecrow idea.

I hope this list has inspired you to get out your calendar and start some planning. Check back for more ideas and tips on how to have more family fun this fall season. I’d love to hear what you love to do with your family, so leave me a comment.

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Tags: Fall Season Family Fun Activities

Thanksgiving Decoration Ideas for the Kids Table

November 23rd, 2010 · Comments Off

TipJunkie.com's Kids' Table Decorating Ideas

On Thankgiving, did you ever have to sit at the Kids’ Table? I distinctly remember being banished to the dark, dank basement to eat with the other messy kids on major Holidays. I didn’t like it. So, I was thrilled when I saw TipJunkie.com’s post on Kids’s Table Decorating Ideas. Some of these ideas are so cute and creative!!!!! If our kids table had looked like this, I would still be sitting there as an adult.

So, get crafting and your kids are sure to be thankful that they aren’t eating in the dark, boring basement.

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Thanksgiving Family Fun Ideas

November 17th, 2010 · Comments Off

Looking for some fun ideas to do with the family around Thanksgiving? Here are a few of my favorites as well as some great ideas from other Mom bloggers.

Get Active! Our town hosts a Turkey Trot 1 Mile and 5K race every Thanksgiving morning. While we usually travel out of town to visit family on Thanksgiving so we have never been in town to participate, several of our neighbors run as a family every year. It’s a great way to burn the calories before you pack in the carbs!

Bake Up Memories. We have a family tradition on Thanksgiving Day. After we gorge ourselves and the boys go watch football or take a nap on the couch, the women folk go back in the kitchen and make our favorite Holiday cookies. Each person brings their favorite recipe and we bake, bake, bake. (It keeps us awake and standing so we’re burning the Turkey dinner calories, right?)

When we started this tradition it was fun to see what Grandma’s favorite cookie recipe was when she was a kid. Now that she is gone, we still make those cookies to remember her by. The other benefits of this tradition are that everyone goes home with a plate of assorted cookies. Freeze them and pull them out for your Holiday parties. If that’s not a stress-bustin’ tip, I don’t know what is.

Here’s a post I wish I had written! Check out the great A to Z Thanksgiving Family Fun Ideas from Cindy Bultema at the SheSparkles Blog.

Marie at MakeandTakes.com offers some fun ideas for Turkey Bowling and Turkey Bingo.

TheMotherHuddle.com also had some very cute ideas for Thanksgiving family activities. I love the Ornament Exchange idea!

What fun activities does your family do on or around Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving Family Road Trip Essentials

November 10th, 2010 · 2 Comments

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Thanksgiving is just around the corner and you know what that means … get out the fat pants! No, I mean ROADTRIP! It is that time of year when we all pile in the car with our suitcases, non-perishable Thanksgiving dinner contributions, and the dog and head out to Grandma’s House for Thanksgiving dinner. Since we’ve made the Thanksgiving Roadtrip to Iowa every year for 10 years, I thought I would pass along a few tips that my family relies on to make the trip go a little easier.

Roadtrip Car Essentials:

Snacks - No messy or crumbly snacks. Unless you want to start an all-you-can-eat snack bar under the back seats. Little, individual size snack bags work perfect. Grapes are good, easy to eat and no peel to worry about. No juice boxes. Put drinks in drip-proof sippy cups or sports bottles so they don’t leak or get squirted everywhere. Tip: If you end up eating breakfast in the car as you head out, make sure you don’t order anything with biscuits. They crumble everywhere! I’m talking to you Sausage, Egg & Cheese Biscuit.

Water Bottles – Always have a bottle of water in the car. Even if you don’t drink it, it’s nice to be able to rinse off your hands or that binky that fell in the back seat and is now wearing a dog hair fur coat.

Garbage Bag – Always have a bag in the car to throw out trash. Trust us, you don’t want to hold a snotty Kleenex or ketchup covered wrapper or banana peel for 4 hours. (Been there. Done that. Not fun.)

Pillows, Snuggle Buddies, or Neck Wraps – If the stars are aligned and Holiday fortune is smiling on you, your young kids will fall asleep for awhile. (When they are older, they put their iPod headphones on and they may as well be asleep.) While most kids are resilient and flexible, they shouldn’t have to kiss their navel while they are napping. Give them some support.

Antibacterial Wipes/Hand Sanitizer – You have kids. Need I say more?

Boredom Bag – You’ll need plenty of entertainment to keep the kids (and adults) amused during the long car trip. In my next post, I’ll share some ideas on how to fill that Boredom Bag for younger and older kids.

What items do you take on your Holiday Road Trips that you can’t live without?

10 Ideas for Friday Night Family Fun

November 9th, 2010 · 1 Comment

Friday Night Family Fun

Friday night rolls around and you want to do something fun with your family, right? However, you’re tired, it’s cold out, and you didn’t plan anything. No worries! Use this list of easy ideas to have some extra special fun with your family this Fall! Best part, you can use whatever you have at home already. No shopping necessary and these ideas work with kids of all ages. Have fun!

Disco Dance Night

2. Neighborhood Fire Pit – Put the fire pit on the driveway and have the kids round up the neighbors.

3. Camp in the Great Indoors – Too cold to camp outside? Camp inside. Cook the s’mores in your fireplace.

4. Family Slumber Party – Put the PJs on, get your sleeping bags, and play games.

5. Bring Game Night Back– Get those games out of the closet and rediscover some fun.

6. Family Movie Screening – Make movie night more special by watching yourself on screen. Get out the wedding video or watch the movies you’ve taken over the last few years of the kids and haven’t watched.

7. Wii Tournament – Challenge the family to Bowling, Raving Rabbids, or Mario Kart.

8. Bake cookies – Take turns licking the batter and making some favorite recipes. Bake Holiday cookies, freeze them and have them ready for upcoming Holiday parties. Now that’s organized!

9. Create your Holiday Newsletter – Have everyone write their section for the Holiday newsletter or better yet, film it this year and send out a CD or post the video on YouTube.com. People will love seeing 3-year-old Michael talk.

10. Family Room Picnic – Lay out the blanket, grab your paper plates and eat dinner on the family room floor. A change of routine makes an ordinary dinner seem extraordinary.

What does your family like to do on Friday night to have fun?

Feliz Dia de los Muertos

November 1st, 2010 · Comments Off

It Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead today. It’s a wonderful Holiday that reminds us to remember and cherish the memories of those we have lost. We built our family’s Day of the Dead shrine and tonight at dinner we will have fun talking about what we like most and miss most about our family, pets and friends who are no longer with us.

Read Why I Love Day of the Dead and then read How to Teach Your Kids About Day of the Dead.

Whoever you are remembering tonight, have fun and remind your kids that you are never gone from this earth, if someone remembers you.

We got Booed!

October 27th, 2010 · Comments Off

How cool is this! I just published a post earlier today about Halloween Family Traditions and I mentioned that I had seen people online talking about the tradition of Getting Booed, but I had never heard of it. Well, I just came home and saw that we were Booed! (So, now I know that someone other than my Mother reads the blog.)

Yeah! Some incredibly nice friend or neighbor left us a Halloween bucket full of candy and an inflatable black cat which my daughter has now adopted and named Meiu. (“Say it with a French accent, Mom.”)

OK, we’re ready to carry on this tradition. I’m off to create the Boo basket we’re going to give and print our Boo signs.

Halloween is so much fun, don’t you think?

Fun Halloween Family Traditions

October 27th, 2010 · Comments Off

Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year. What’s not to love about fun, treats, costumes, parties, and spooky chills. We have a few family traditions we do every year and I’ve seen a few more online that I would love to adopt. Read on and plan some fun for this week.

1. Decorations. If you haven’t decorated the house yet for Halloween – get on it! One of my favorite parts about trick or treating is seeing how everyone spooks out their house. I love the creativity. Whether you prefer fall elegant to grotesque to friendly ghosts and monsters, let’s see your Halloween spirit.

2. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Watch it. Love it. Need I say more? It’s on this Thursday night on ABC at 7 p.m. CST. (Scared Shrekless is on at the same time on NBC. I haven’t seen it so can’t recommend it, but I’m going to DVR it.)

3. The Nightmare Before Christmas. I am a huge Jack Skellington fan. The kids still get a little creeped out by this movie so it’s a tradition for my hubbie and I to curl up on the couch and get our annual movie fix. Not all family traditions need to involve the kids. (We made Jack Skellington Cupcakes this year. See how.)

Jerry Seinfeld Halloween Book

4. Read Halloween Stories before Bedtime. We love to read Halloween stories in anticipation of the big day. Read my post on the Best Halloween Books for Kids (as voted by my kids). I just read about how DesignMom.com and her family have a tradition of reading Halloween stories by candle light. I love it! We’re going to read by the flickering flames tonight.

Trick or Treating Kids

5. Neighborhood Halloween Procession. Our neighborhood trick or treats together which makes if more fun for kids and parents alike. We’ve got some wagons to pull the younger ones who get tired. We’ve also got some thermos’ with hot chocolate if it’s cold.

6. Boo Your Neighbors. Now, I have never heard of this tradition but I saw a post on it the other day and it sounded pretty cool so I thought I would share. (I’m probably the only one who hasn’t so don’t laugh at me.) Basically, you make up a goodie bag for a friend or neighbor. You then leave the goodie bag at their house with a poem and sign that they have been “Booed.” The neighbor then is supposed to reciprocate and “Boo” someone else. This post explains it pretty well. You can download some very cool Boo signs and instructions for free at TomKat Studios.

7. Day of the Dead Dinner. This is the day after Halloween but every year we celebrate Dia de los Muertos in our house honoring and remembering our loved ones who have passed on. We build a shrine in our house where we display photos of the people and pets we want to remember. To celebrate at dinner, we usually make one of Grandpa Kirchner’s favorite meals and as a family we talk about our favorite memories of Grandpa and our pets who have died. It’s a nice way to keep memories alive and share stories about what we remember and what we liked best about those we miss.

What Halloween traditions do you enjoy with your family?

Fun Halloween Cupcakes for Kids

October 27th, 2010 · 1 Comment

This past weekend for our Halloween fun activity, we decorated cupcakes. I had seen so many incredibly cool cupcake designs on other sites that I wanted to see if we could recreate them. The goal was to make them for the kids’ school Halloween parties this Friday, but guess what? They’re gone already.

There are a million cupcake recipes out there to make the cupcakes from scratch (go ahead, Google Cupcake recipes and prepare to be overwhelmed) but we made life a little easier and just chocolate cupcakes from a mix. We were in the mood to decorate, not bake. So, how did we do?

Jack Skellington Cupcakes
I love the movie Nightmare Before Christmas so when I saw these Jack Skellington cupcakes on the Disney Family.com site, I started to drool. I thought it was easy to do and the instructions were very helpful however, my daughter got mad because she couldn’t get the face to come out right. You need fairly good icing control. Her cupcakes looked like a cool ghoul, but not exactly like Jack.

Spooky Owl Cupcakes
Owls are the “it” animal this year, as I said in my post Owls are Hot! Hoo Hoo Knew? So, my daughter, who was a big fan of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole wanted to make these cupcakes. You can find slightly different versions of these owl cupcakes on a variety of different sites (as I said, owls are hot) but we chose this photo at TheCupcakeBlog.com as inspiration.

We used, chocolate frosting, Oreos, white frosting and M&Ms. These cupcakes were super easy and my kids could put them together like pros. We frosted the cupcake. Split open Oreo cookies for the eyes and “ears.” Once the Oreos are split, take the piece without the white center and break them into “ear” shapes. Then put M&Ms on for eyeballs and an M&M turned sideways for the beak.

The only two issues we had were that the Oreos were hard to break open. I remember as a kid you could just twist them apart so I don’t know what’s in these cookies now but the centers are like super glue. These needed to be pried open with a knife or they would break in pieces. Also, when we did get them to break open cleanly, the white center part had black crumbs all over it from the other side of the cookie. It didn’t look like a nice, clean, white eyeball. So we used white frosting on the inside of the cookies which actually made it easier for the M&M eyeballs to stick. All in all, a great recipe for the kids.

Spider Web Cupcakes
Our inspiration for these easy spider web cupcakes came from Bakerella.com. We did it in reverse with white frosting on the cupcake and a black web. We also used M&Ms for the spider since we had them out anyway.

Finally, we just got out our collection of sprinkles, almond slivers, and other toppings to create our own ideas. Creating bats, cats, tarantulas, and werewolves was a pretty fun afternoon with the family.

Have you made any cool Halloween cupcakes that you’d like to share? Send me a link to your photos and I’ll post them on the blog.

6 Fun Halloween Things To Do This Weekend

October 23rd, 2010 · Comments Off

It’s the weekend before Halloween and all through the house, there wasn’t enough spookiness, not even to scare a mouse. So what are you waiting for …

You’ve still got time to have some Halloween-themed fun with the kids this weekend. Here are 6 ideas to get your fun on.

1. Corn Maze – I never really got into corn mazes until I found out you could do them in the dark. With flashlights! Why didn’t anyone tell me this sooner!?! I wouldn’t recommend that you take toddlers to the corn maze at night but for older kids (and some weird adults like myself), this is a blast. If you are in a group of 4 or more, split into teams. Give each team a flashlight and a compass and see who can get out of the maze first. Look online to find the largest corn maze in your area and make it a night.

2. Pumpkin Farm – Pumpkin Farms are fun for the kids but they are priceless to adults for the photo ops. There is nothing better than photos of your kids standing amidst a field of orange pumpkins. Go now. Don’t forget the cider donuts.

3. Halloween Baking – I have seen so many cute Halloween treat ideas online that I am paralyzed by what to tackle first. We are going to tackle cupcakes this weekend but I am totally into Bakerella’s Halloween Cake Pops. I have to make these Spider Brownie Bites. But wait, look at these Spooky Sweet Pops. Ah! I can’t decide. (BTW, Bakerella has a new Cake Pops cookbook out. I’m going to get it this weekend, because I need more food porn.)

4. Organize a Neighborhood Trick or Treat Procession – My neighborhood rocks. We do such fun things together. When we moved into our first house, the neighbors who lived behind us showed us the fun of a Trick or Treat Procession. You get a bunch of friends and neighbors and go trick or treating together. What was cool about their procession was that they had wagons full of snacks and hot chocolate, wagons to pull the young ones who get tired after 3 blocks, dogs on leashes in costumes, and plenty of cameras and video cameras to capture the fun. While trick or treating as a family is fun … why not multiply that by inviting 3 or 4 families? Now, the adults can have a blast walking around too.

5. Costume Frenzy. You’ve got the school Halloween parties coming up on Friday so this is your weekend to finish the kids’ costumes. Whether you are buying or making, get it all done this weekend so you aren’t panicking at the last minute. If making, have fun working together on the construction. We’re making a gingerbread and gladiator costume this weekend. (For even more fun, go back and look at past Halloween costume pictures for some nostalgia and big laughs.)

6. Day of the Dead - If you live in a town with a large hispanic population, go online and see if there are any Day of the Dead or Dia de los Muertos exhibits to check out. Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art hosts the largest Day of the Dead exhibit in the country. It’s AWESOME! We go every year to get inspired to make our Day of the Dead shrine even cooler. Never heard of Day of the Dead? Read why I love it and think it is a great Holiday to share with kids.

Help! How to Keep All of that School Paperwork Organized

September 29th, 2010 · Comments Off

HybridMom.com header

Check out the article I wrote at HybridMom.com on 5 Tips for Organizing School Paperwork.

A big welcome to any new readers from HybridMom.com! I love meeting new people and helping families inject more fun into their daily lives with simple, creative and memorable ideas.

While you are at HybridMom.com, check out their list of the Top 20 Fall Family Activity Blogs. Check out one in your city so you don’t miss out on any chances for “Chocolate Cake Moments” with your family. (I hadn’t even heard of the site they listed for Chicago. I learn something new every day.)

Which family activity blogs do you use to find fun ideas for your family? Let’s make our own list here.

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10 Family Fun Ideas to Celebrate the Fall Season

September 21st, 2010 · 2 Comments

Yeah, today is the first official day of Autumn! This is my family’s favorite time of year. The weather is cooler, the trees look beautiful as they say goodbye to the year, we break out the spooky Halloween and Day of the Dead decorations, and we go gaga for Apple Cider Donuts. (Man, I love a good donut.)

We make sure we don’t miss out on a minute of fun by creating a Family Fun Plan. We pick a night and at dinner everyone throws out ideas of what they want to do and we then schedule our activities on the calendar. We now know if we need to buy tickets to anything, get invitations out, or have the house clean by a certain date. (Oh yes, our social calendar dictates when the house gets cleaned.) Once our activities are written in stone (OK, just in the planner – but in PEN!) we have some fun times to look forward to.

Here are some of our ideas for having more family fun this Fall. If you are looking for more ideas check your local park districts, libraries, YMCAs, and Children’s Museums for fall events.

Top 10 Ideas for Fall Family Fun

We found this article at the DomesticCents.com blog on Frugal Fall Family Fun Ideas that we wanted to share. I love their photos and Scarecrow idea.