Cheap Summertime Entertainment

With Zeke all casted up, our summertime fun has been kind of stymied.  We haven't done a lot that involves water.  So no pool, no sprinkler, no water guns.  We did do bubbles a couple of times.  It also means Zeke can't ride his bike, play on our playground, dig in the rocks, or swing on the swings.  (All things the kids do constantly.)  We've also tried to stick to a somewhat structured morning with an art and building time, a writing time, a puzzle and board game time, and a math time.  The big kids are reading in the afternoon and doing a few pages of phonics but they also usually read before bed.  Too much free time ends up with my kids fighting constantly or the kids just hanging out not really playing anything.  I think we've come up with a good balance of 30 minutes of an activity and then free time before lunch and most of the afternoon.  The big kids have pushed Zeke in the stroller in the street.  They've played traffic cop, with Zeke giving them directions as they ride their bikes.  I taught them out to play Kick the Can (but with a whistle instead of a can).  That lasted maybe ten minutes.  They've learned how to play War with math flash cards.  They've made roads and shapes with sidewalk chalk.  We used cornstarch to make our own sidewalk chalk paint.  They've played hockey in the street with bouncy balls.  They've played soccer and t-ball.  They pilfered all of the greeting cards out of our summer writing supplies and jammed the neighbor's mailboxes with notes.  The big kids have patiently obliged Zeke's whims and drawn him whatever picture he wanted at art time since his own drawing ability is pretty limited right now.  Conleigh's come in several times with purple stained fingers from stealing mulberries off our neighbor's tree.

And we've still got lots to do.  I picked up a giant game of jacks at Target that has 2 inch rubber jacks so I think even Zeke will be able to pick them up.  We've still got a couple of new board games to try out.  I haven't yet showed the big kids how to create sticker stories, where you use stickers for the main parts of your story and then draw in the background and fill in your words.  I'm hoping we can make an aluminum foil river in our backyard without dousing Zeke's arm.  We haven't touched our watercolor paints yet or the precut tissue paper squares that I found at Michaels' on clearance.  The garden is just starting to produce; we just had green beans out of it yesterday.  We hit the Omaha zoo when we were there a few weeks back but we haven't done the Lincoln Children's Zoo yet.  And I'm hoping once Zeke gets his casts off to have a big old "No More Casts" water party with friends.

The summer reading program at the library had the kids make robots as one of the activities in their reading logs.  Conleigh's is named Lucy.  And Zeke's is a shark.

The kids seriously thought this was so funny.  Conleigh was pretending to be Kenson and Kenson was pretending to be Kenson.  The clothespin earrings are a nice touch, don't you think?  Look how Conleigh is standing.  She just did that all on her own, because apparently that's how boys stand.