Easiest Summer Outdoor Activity

Step one: Get a Hose Nozzle Gun.
Step two: Attach to hose.
Step three: Spray kids.

This is more fun than it has the right to be.

We've been having a bit of a heat wave in the NW recently, so we've been trying to find activities to cool off. The kids like running through the sprinkler, which is great fun, but they get themselves really, really, ridiculously wet. And dirty. While this is okay when it is getting close to bedtime, it complicates things a bit if you're just trying to do something quick and fun, particularly in the middle of the day. You know, when it's the hottest? I'm sure a lot of you might be saying to yourselves, "why don't you just throw them into some swim trunks and let them go nuts? Sometimes, that is awesome, but there are still times when I really just want going out and cooling off to be a quick activity (10-15 mins), without anyone getting so wet that they need to change their clothes at all.

The best thing about hose nozzle guns?
You get to control how wet the kids get. You can set it to a mist, or a stream. You can make it rain, have the kids jump over the stream of water, duck under the stream, or whatever else you can think of.
Anyway, it's great.
I am a fan.

Fun With an Egg Package - Goggles

It was a slow morning around these parts. I wasn't feeling great. Honestly, I probably could have slept for another three hours, had that been a viable option. 

So yeah, the kids were extra energetic and I was the opposite of that. Not the best combination.

I went into the kitchen to see if anything looked like it could be interesting for the kids when I spotted an empty egg package sitting out. Ding! Jackpot! I could totally do something fun with this...

Egg not included

And then I stood there, just staring at the thing for three or four minutes, trying to think of what we could possibly do with it.

Blank.

Egg cartons should totally be fun though, right?

Easy Activities - Maptime

It's a map, it's a map, it's a map, it's a map, it's a map. It's a map!

Dora, I hate you. Not as much as I hate Boots and Map, mind you, but it's still hatred and I will not hesitate to label it as such. I will get into that more on another day, but for now, suffice it to say that I can't even think of a map without that song popping into my head. 

It goes without saying then, that this activity resulted in that song looping through my head, ad nauseum.

No cartography lessons, thank you very much

Easy Indoor Activities: Fun with Boxes

With Christmas not too far back in the rear-view mirror, we still have a lot of boxes that we haven't gotten around to letting go of yet. With that in mind, I decided to pull out some of those boxes to figure out what kind of fun things we could do with them.

"But Dad, playing with boxes is totally square"

after the jump: what we did with them

Easy Activities: Fun With Lap Trays

So yesterday, I introduced the concept of F2E (fun to effort ratio), and I realized a few things:

1. I didn't really explain what constitutes effort in my post.
2. You all probably understood it anyway, so I don't even really have a good reason to explain it further. Regardless, I feel strangely compelled to, and I know that it will just stay on my mind until I do. I think that's how crazy works, so I understand that I am treading on dangerous ground here.
3. After making such a big deal out of F2E, I might have sounded somewhat lazy.
4. In order to properly explain this, I am going to sound somewhat more lazy. And then I won't. This will all make sense in a moment...

Alright -- for me, effort is a matter of how much preparation, physical exertion, mental acuity, and clean up, is required to do the activity. Of these things, physical exertion and clean up are my major concerns. And there it is. I just said, more or less, that I didn't want to move around from the couch very much and I don't want to have to clean. That doesn't paint me in a very good light.

saving face and finally getting to the point after the jump

Easy Activities: Paper Airplanes

This morning, I was dragging pretty hard. I just couldn't muster the energy to be particularly fun or creative. I needed to find something that we I could do that would give us a high Fun-To-Effort ratio score (referred to hereafter as the F2E Score, or just F2E).

Then it hit me: Paper Airplanes! I gave the kiddos some paper and crayons and told them to go hog-wild. When they were finished coloring, I turned their plain old stationary (haha) artwork into aviationary artwork (that's totally a real word, as far as I'm concerned). Not too time or labor intensive, but fun. F2E ftw.

Mine had one of those old warplane style mouths on it. I am more excited about that than I should be.

Videographic evidence after the jump