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