Travel & Leisure: Keeping Them Busy

While caring for small children is a delight and a privilege, sometimes the hours do drag on. After a long day, it can be a challenge to keep the remaining shreds of one's sanity while waiting for kids to topple over into sleep.

We may not have retained our own sanity, but we have devised a few tactics for keeping small children busy.

Colored shaving cream
This is a messy outside activity!

You'll need a bottle of cheap shaving cream, some food coloring, a small washable table and some stirrers. A towel and hose for cleanup would also be a good idea.

Dispense shaving cream on the table, then dribble on food coloring. Have your child swirl the food coloring and shaving cream around to make different colors and textures. If a kiddie pool is available, your child may enjoy carrying blobs of shaving cream to it and making the water filthy. Others enjoy applying the food coloring directly to their skin. It's all good.

This activity will leave your kids' skin green or red for a few days even if you do manage to bathe them afterward. However, we've found that having a few minutes of relative peace is worth green hands!

Spider house
This activity was inspired by an episode of Charlie and Lola, an animated children's series. To make your own spider house, you'll need a box (it's okay if its been stepped on a few times), some crayons to decorate it and of course a plastic spider or snake to live in it.

Have your child draw household furnishings on the inside of the box - a bed, a rug, curtains. Note that ours has a deluxe color TV just behind the spider. It did have a couch, but that got colored over.

Water soluble packing peanuts
If you're fortunate enough to receive a package that has these, hang on to them. A very similar product can be purchased at craft stores, but free is better!

When brushed with a thin coat of water, these stick together to make interesting "sculptures". Food coloring can be applied to give them color or make them dissolve into a disgusting slime. They can also be composted or tossed in the toilet for target practice for little boys who are learning to urinate standing up.

Box o' tissues
Do you have a box of facial tissues on hand? Then you have the ingredients for five or ten minutes of peace! Simply hand the box of tissues to your child. He or she will carefully extract each and every one of them from the box, strewing them on the floor. This should buy you just enough time to use the toilet, pop some aspirin or have a brief, uninterrupted conversation with your spouse.

Afterward, you can either jam all of the tissues back in the box for future mayhem or save them in a plastic bag. Chances are that they'll still be clean enough for wiping runny noses and sponging up puke.

This is a fun activity for even very young children, but they do have to be watched in case they want to eat the tissues. You'll also need to keep other boxes of tissue up high and out of reach once he or she has learned how fun it is to take them apart.

Bunch o' grapes
The next time you see a bunch of plastic grapes at a yard sale, grab them! Kids love to pull the grapes off their stems. They also make less harmful projectiles than many other things that children throw, and they're far less painful to step on than marbles.

Once the bunch of grapes has been thoroughly dissected, you can engage your child in a tossing game. Grab an empty box (such as the tissue box which was previously emptied) or plastic bottle, stand your child some distance away from it, and have him try to throw the grapes in.

Naturally, the grapes will get scattered all over the house. However, they aren't dirty, merely messy; they can easily be rounded up with a broom. After your child gets bored with throwing them around, you can recycle them into this lovely grape mosaic tissue box.