Unplugged Fun

Well, here it is....finally. We have on occasion unplugged our family from tv and video games recently. Ethan enjoys the activities but with Josh and I wanting to detach quite often we admittedly don't do enough "unplugging".   We all love it when we take the time to do something fun, we just need to do it more.  Here is a look at some of the things we do for family time.


First up we combined two of Ethan's favorite activities.  Photography and books.  Ethan loves to go to the library and get books to read (and a video to watch).  Here are some of the books he picked out on one trip.

Here are some candid shots of us....

Building a fort in the basement....

One of our favorite stores to go to is US Toys .  They have toys, party supplies, arts and crafts, teacher supplies.  You name it, they've got it! Don't forget to cruise the store and find their clearance section.  That is where we found this beauty for just $1! Ethan and I played with this for at least an hour, changing the guys clothes, moving the diggers around, etc.  A great toy at a great price.

I read about this paper online somewhere and decided to spend the $7 at US Toys for it.  We still haven't done all the things they suggest at Roylco and it has been worth every penny!

Here is Ethan with the diffusing paper.  We used food coloring and water to make works of art!

Just drop some food coloring onto the paper and spray with the water and VOILA!

You can also use water color paints, water soluble markers, all sorts of stuff.

We have some lengths of twine hanging in our dining room where we display our art and other projects.  Here are "transfers" of our diffusing paper work drying.

We love to make pancakes and I've gotten quite good at free-hand shapes.  This was another idea from somewhere online.  Putting some of the batter in a squeeze bottle (we used an empty Chocolate Milk Sauce bottle), and add a bit of food coloring.  You first squirt the shape or whatever into the hot pan then pour more batter over it and you get an embedded image in the pancake!

Or you can make letters, shapes, etc with the squeeze bottle mixture.

We've also taken to camping out in the living room on occasion.  Air mattresses, sleeping bags, some pillows and a movie.  Great time!

These are some more candid shots of the family.  Ethan's favorite face to pull.

I love to sew stuff and thought, why not bean bags? So, I found some material I've had for probably around 10 years and made some up.  We found some lentils in the cupboard (that have been there for over a year) to fill them with.

Here is Josh juggling the new lentil bags.  We also found some games for Ethan to play with them.  Though I don't have any pictures of those.  Oops.  We just took one of each color of construction paper we had, wrote in large letters the name of the color on one side and a number on the other.  We would ask him to toss a bag on a certain color or number.  Or, he would toss it on a color or number and he had to tell us what color or number it was.

In an effort to find things for us to do during our unplugged times, I went to the library and simply searched "unplugged" on the computers.  I found a really great book I need to buy a copy of called "365 Days of Creative Play for Children 2 years and Up" by Sheila Ellison and Judith Anne Gray.    They have a number of similar books but this one was my favorite!

Well, here is hoping we take the initiative to "unplug" more often.  It makes us all feel good.