Here is a video of my son running inside a ball like a gerbil. We found these huge balls at the state fair.
My daughter also wanted a turn. The huge plastic ball is pulled to the side of the shallow pool, and a woman unzips it. The kid steps into the ball and starts running (or falling). It’s sort of like a trampoline as you jump on the water inside the ball.
I had sugar cookie dough left over from a different project, so I decided to make maple leaf cookies. I found a plastic maple leaf cookie cutter at Hobby Lobby for 75 cents. My five-year-old rolled out the dough, and the kids took turns cutting out their leaves with the cookie cutter.
After baking and cooling the cookies, I mixed up some autumn-colored frosting. I put lots of yellow food coloring into white frosting to make the burnt orange color. (Use professional food coloring – it’s much brighter than what you dye Easter eggs with.) For the maroon color, I looked at the food coloring and realized I had no red. I used lots of hot pink. My husband walked past, and I asked him what color to add to make the pink color turn into maroon? He said blue. For a minute I thought it was going to turn brown. (I should have just used chocolate frosting then!) But after mixing it some more (and throwing in some cocoa powder), I saw a lovely maroon color. I dusted the cookies with cocoa powder.
This is a great baking activity to do in the autumn, since maple leaf cookies reflect what is happening in nature. I love how these maple leaf cookies turned out!
Saving money on children’s clothes has been important to me, since the children outgrow their clothing so fast. I came home a few days ago with fresh clothing for each of my children for the fall. I usually go to a children’s resale shop. Many of these shops will give you cash or in-store credit for clothing that is outgrown, or toys that your children no longer play with. I can’t remember how many times God has provided exactly what my children needed through these resale shops. I take boxes of things I no longer need. I pray that God will provide the very things that I need for my children. When the exchange is done, only a few coins are spent. I get a huge bag of almost new, name-brand clothing for my children for (basically) free!
Yard sales are another place I go to get clothing, and I find wonderful things sometimes. But the resale shops have clothing in all the sizes of my children, and it’s all in one spot, so it’s a better use of my time. Plus, a garage sale won’t swap my old stuff for me to buy their stuff. They are in the mood to make money and don’t want any more stuff. Plus, I’ve noticed that at most yard sales, clothing isn’t even worth looking at, unless you are in a rich neighborhood. I don’t understand why people put out stained, stretched-out clothing, as if anyone would buy such garbage. This is what gives garage sales a bad name – mostly the pathetic clothing!
That said, this time I actually did spend money. That’s because I had nothing to exchange. And normally I show some sort of wisdom as I switch over the children’s clothing from summer to fall. I write down what each child lacks. If one of my children doesn’t have swim trunks (because he’s grown out of his smaller ones), I write that down. If someone’s winter jacket has a broken zipper and a missing hood, I write that down. You see, it’s like grocery shopping. I come armed with a list. And I mostly stick to the list, unless I see something wonderful that we always need, like more long-sleeved shirts for the boys, especially for my oldest boy, since he hands them down to his two younger brothers.
So I didn’t have a list for the first time, and I had nothing to swap, and I was in the mood to go shopping. I knew the kids needed fall clothing. My husband blessed my shopping spree and gave me cash. He said, “Have fun.” I felt oddly disoriented with cash in my pocket and without my list, but I cried out to God as I drove the car, that would He please provide what I needed, even though I didn’t know what it was!
God was so good. I looked through the racks, starting with size 10 for my oldest son. (I always shop for my sons first, since shopping for girl’s clothing is so much more fun!) The only thing I could find was three long-sleeved shirts. Come to find out the next day when I switched over the boys’ clothes, that’s the very thing he needed. He only had five shirts, and one or two of them looked like they might be too small. So three more shirts rounded out his only need for clothing. (I’m choked up, because only God could have known that.)
For my second son, several months ago, I asked him what he would get if he had a million dollars. His eyes got wide, and he looked like he had never thought of what he wanted before. He finally said, “A new pair of pajamas.” I laughed. I said, “What’s wrong with your pajamas?” “I’m just sick of looking at them every day,” he replied. You’ll never guess what I found at the resale shop: a new-looking, very soft and comfy pair of pajamas. He loved the color, and he was so happy.
I also found two name-brand sweaters for him, and later on I found out that he was my only son with virtually no sweaters. (Snow is on the ground up to five months here in Washington.) I also found a long-sleeved shirt he loved.
For my third son, I only found two things, but it ended up that he didn’t really need much. I found a beautiful coat for my daughter, and this was odd because her other jacket was fine except for the stains. God was so sweet, He upgraded her jacket just to make me feel rich and lavished upon. You know how God is. And I found some long-sleeved shirts, which she badly needed, having only two or three in her closet, and having to wear them every day for fall, winter, and spring.
I guess the biggest way to save money while shopping for children’s clothes is to commit your way to the Lord, and just see what He will do.
My children always enjoyed playing with tubes and connectors in the bath tub. They would join the tubes and connectors in many different ways, and they would put a funnel in the top to make it easier to put water into the contraption. If you tint the water blue or some other color (you can buy something that looks like pills at Toys R Us or Walmart in the children’s bath section), the children can see the water rushing through the clear tubing. If you have two possible ways for the water to go, you can ask your children which way they think the water will go. Sometimes it goes both ways equally, but often it will go down only one tube. You can talk about gravity and see what happens if you tilt the whole contraption.
One really fun experiment you can do is to combine two different colors to see what new color emerges. Put one color of water down one tube
, and another color down another tube at the same time, and see what color comes out at the bottom. If you have no money for those color pills, you can use food coloring from your kitchen, and I would do it outside, making it land in a wide bucket. Your kids should wear old clothes, because food coloring can stain your clothes.
You can have a great time even if you just use clear water. My children built and designed many contraptions, and they never built the same thing twice. It was an open-ended activity that was educational as well as fun.
If you like this idea, you will love my audio workshop entitled “Bath Time Fun: 49 Ideas for Homeschoolers,” available on my website.
I’m giving away one copy of the Bath Time Fun workshop. Enter the drawing below:
