Summer is a great time for families to connect, especially families where the parent is a teacher, like ours.  God has been challenging me in the area of fatherhood, so I asked Him for help.  I am going to go on a 30 day summer journey of spending focused and fantastically fun quality time with my kiddos each day. Pictures will flow freely.  Hopefully one day they can look at this blog and laugh...

Day 1 (June 27, 2012)

What partially prompted this "journey" was the look of discontentment on my daughters face as I stared at my cell phone for minutes at a time, checked Facebook for an hour, and then was barely able to play with her in a focused manner for longer than ten minutes.  She started getting squirrely, bothering her little brother, doing little mischievous things to get my attention, etc.  When I saw this I knew some positive attention was in order.  I sat online and gathered inexpensive ideas that would be fun for us to do together and made myself a little calendar on Publisher to keep track of our activities so I can plan for the next day/week.

First fun quality time event:  Animal masks.  What's more fun than pretending you're a jungle animal?  However, I quickly learned that for younger children (Zion is four), it is challenging to do crafts because their abilities are limited to cutting in straight lines, using glue sticks to stick things down, and basic coloring.  So I had her cut out the trunk of the elephant and she also cut out pieces of paper to put on the mane of the lion.  So the percentage of what she did on the project was about 10% to my 90% but we had fun and the whole point was to spend time together and not get caught up in my manly mindset of having the project come out the way I foresaw it...

If anyone wants some ideas for animal masks, here are some printables:   http://www.firstpalette.com/Craft_themes/Animals/animalmasks/animalmask.html

Day 1, June 27 - Animal Masks!!

Day 2, June 28 - Ooblek!!

Today we will be making "ooblek" together  (http://www.kidsmakestuff.com/articles/show/6bk0).  Waiting for Asher to get up from his nap so we can go get cornstarch...wait, some may be in the cabinet...and bingo was his name-o...

Ooblek was awesome!!  Zion had tons of fun!!  We let Asher play with play-dough while we were oobleking because he would have taken clean up to a whole other level!!  All we needed to make it was cornstarch and water.  You take about 3/4 cup of water, pour it into a bowl, and then slowly add cornstarch until the mixture becomes too difficult to stir.  Ooblek is then born.  We had fun getting messy, building ooblek snowmen (which quickly "melt"), and pouring it over each others hands.  Fun times!!

Ooblek!!!

Day 3, June 29 - Incredible Pizza

Had the thought that Incredible Pizza is pretty cheap if you just go play games, thus idea for day three is born!  We had fun playing Fruit Ninja huge edition, Deal or No Deal (won 100 tickets), kiddie coaster simulator, a race car game (Zion sat in my lap and did the wheel), etc.  We had enough tickets for lollipops and a doll...

Day Four - Doling Fitness Center

Took the kiddos to the Doling Fitness Center today to run around the gym and the track. We chucked basketballs around the gym for a while, then ran around the track for about 10 laps, and all ended up quite red in the face. We then played some air hockey and Asher laughed every time I moved his hand to hit the puck with the air hockey bumper.  It was good fun...

July 6th - Rock craft and misc.

Haven't posted for a few days due to laziness/the 4th festivities!

On the 2nd and 3rd, Zion and I did our "painting rocks" craft, transforming stones from our front yard into animals via paint!  We picked a shark, a turtle and ladybugs.  They came out great!  Here is the link from Martha Stewart's site:  http://www.marthastewart.com/264231/rock-crafts?center=276964&gallery=274922&slide=182480.  It was even cool enough in the evening to go outside and hit the trampoline, which is typically baking in the midday sun!  I think one of these days I am going to attempt to cook lunch on it...

On the 4th, we went to a friend's house for a BBQ and swimming and had some fun in the sun!  It has been 100 degrees in the shade here (and across most of the nation) for about two weeks straight!!  Our little, old, puke green A/C unit outside is just a chuggin' away!!

Today we are going to go to Target and see if we can find Hungry, Hungry Hippos which I think is an excellent addition to any homes game collection...however, if someone wants to find the 90's game "Crossfire" online and buy it for me, that would be welcome as well...