Balloon Boats

If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I don’t do much that requires prep ahead of time. I prefer to use that time for sleep, which makes me more patient with my kids during their many activities. This activity looks cool, but requires very little time to assemble – I did it while they were already in the tub. It was actually Robin’s idea. She’s quite an inventor.

After our walk we left the nesting materials out on the ground and over branches in our front yard. We surrounded it with birdseed, then waited. From our window, I saw a Grackle land on the ground and pick up one of our long pieces of grass. Then it put dropped the grass, hopped away, picked up a piece of garbage, and flew up into a tree… well, we tried. But we can’t compete with that.

Pretend McDonalds

Ingredients:

• McDonald’s boxes (saved from previous meal there)
• Old McDonald’s Toys or other small toys, wrapped in tin foil (I have a ton of actual McDonald’s toys from my childhood)
• Paper sandwich bags
• Play food (available at our local dollar store)

There are two ways to play this game. You can put the play food inside the boxes with a toy and let the kids pretend that they are at McDonald’s. Or, you can make homemade chicken nuggets and fries and put them in the paper sandwich bags and serve them, with the ton the boxes, for dinner. Both are a lot of fun! My friends have enjoyed watching their kids opening their toys and seeing the ones they remember from their own childhood.

Balloon Type: These days there are specific water balloons you can buy at Canadian Tire or the Dollar Store, but for this, I actually prefer using real balloons. They are less likely to break when you don’t want them to.

Those Accordion Tubes

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Note: Make sure to break up the skewers before throwing them out, or you will end up with a hole in the bag and garbage water all over the bottom of your garbage bin.