How Do You Fill 1,000 Hours of Summer with Fun?

By Jen Singer

Creator of www.MommaSaid.net, a Forbes Best of the Web community for stay-at-home moms

SUMMERTIME TIP SHEET:
5 Summertime Survival Tips for Stay-at-Home Moms

Remember summers past, when your mom sent you outside to play all day, riding bikes, catching frogs and playing ball until she called you in for dinner? Well guess what? This isn't your mother's motherhood.

Twenty-first century stay-at-home moms can't just shoo the kids outdoors while making a roast for dinner. Rather, they've got to organize and supervise the 75 or so days of summer before school starts back up again. How will you keep the peace when the ice pops run out, the kids get on each other's nerves and someone sits on your couch in a wet, sandy swimsuit?

Jen Singer, creator of www.MommaSaid.net ,a Forbes Best of the Web community for at-home moms, says, "By the time Memorial Day rolls around, stay-at-home moms start scrambling to fill the thousand hours of summertime ahead." Singer, author of "14 Hours 'Til Bedtime," adds, "When the kiddie pool loses its appeal and the last of the water guns break, you need a back-up plan." Singer offers these summertime survival tips:

Create a ritual. Summer is generally a time without schedules - no school bus to catch, no Mommy and Me classes, no soccer practice. But three months is a loooong time to fill with fun. Break up the free time by creating a ritual to look forward to, including: visiting Grandma, going out for ice cream cones and eating them while people-watching, checking on the progress of a neighbor's construction and collecting coins to throw in the fountain at the (air-conditioned) mall.

Open a rainy-day movie theater. Send "tickets" to the neighborhood kids or your kids' friends to "go to the movies" - at your house. Rent a kids' movie to show on your TV, make popcorn and hand out juice boxes. Then let a neighbor run the next showing, so you (and your floors) can have a break, too.

Celebrate Halloween in July (or June, or August). Encourage the kids to create their own Halloween costumes - or cram them into last year's. Then recruit a few neighbors to give out candy to trick-or-treaters. If there's no one around your neighborhood during the day, invite friends from near and far to a local playground and hold your own summertime Halloween party there.

Stage a Kid Olympics. Schedule a sport or event every day for a week. Have a soccer match in the morning and run water sports in the afternoon. Create an obstacle course where the kids have to run through the hose and pick up tennis balls at one end of the yard, and then run back through and place them in buckets. Report the results of the events at the end of each day, and hand out aluminum foil medals. Chances are, the kids will be so tired, they'll even go to bed before the sun goes down.

Go on a treasure hunt. Draw or cut out pictures of things you can find in your yard, the woods or at the park: leaves, twigs, bugs, rocks, etc. Then lead your kids (or send the older ones while you sit down) to collect each item in a plastic container. Keep the cool stuff they find... you know, the stuff that's not living and therefore won't fly around your house.

ABOUT JEN SINGER

Jen Singer is the creator of the award-winning MommaSaid.net and the author of "14 Hours 'Til Bedtime," which has been excerpted in Parents and American Baby, and featured in Parenting and The New York Times. She has spoken about motherhood on CBS The Early Show, ABC's World News Now and NBC News. She is the creator of Please Take My Children to Work Day, a June holiday for at-home mothers which has been officially proclaimed by several governors … so far. She is a Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year and a ClubMom expert. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and two sons who talk to her through the bathroom door.

06/06/2006