Brooke Wheeler, a stay-at-home mom to two young children in Gretna, wrote this guest blog for momaha.
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In general, I enjoy the winter months. Winter means Christmas, possibly snow days, and just a good reason to stay at home more often and relax with the family.
In a way the snow and cold forces you to settle into a slower pace, which to me is a welcome transition after the hustle and bustle that the summer and fall months seem to bring.
However, around this time of the year, I find myself starting to want to part ways with the cold weather. I think the urgency for this comes as I see boredom settle into my kids. It’s the end of January, we’ve come down from the excitement that the holidays brought and are just bored.
We’re an outdoorsy kind of family that craves fresh air to clear our minds. Not being able to wears on us.
So we put our creative caps on and try to come up with new things to do. I recently saw a post about bathtub fishing and decided to recreate the experience.
The other day, my 3-year-old and I did a little bathtub fishing, and we had an absolute blast!
Here is what you need to do this activity:
Fishing pole and/or a net
Hot glue gun
Magnet
Magnetic letters/numbers
Food coloring or color changing bath tablets (optional)
Directions:
1. To get the fishing pole ready, I used my hot glue gun to glue a magnet onto the end of a fishing weight.
2. Fill your bathtub with water. Add a couple of drops of blue food coloring (or the colored bath tablets if you have them) if you want your water to resemble ocean water.
3. Toss in you magnetic numbers/letters and any other bath toys you think they’d like to catch. I had some ocean bath toys that I included, and they were a huge hit with my son.
4. You’re all ready to start fishing! You will likely have to demonstrate a few times how to release the line and then reel it back in, but they’ll get the hang of it in no time.
After fishing with his pole for a while, my little guy wanted to use his net and probably had even more fun just using that. He would get so excited when he’d catch something and then we would talk about which letter or object he had caught. He had so much fun with this and spent over an hour “fishing”. When he woke up from his afternoon nap, the first thing he asked was if he could go fishing again.
My son’s shirt and pants were soaked by the end of this, which to him only added to the fun, but I have now made a mental note to dress him more appropriately for this activity in the future.
You can find more, kids craft ideas on Brooke’s blog,thewheelerweekly.com, which is has been nominated for the Circle of Moms Top 25 Creative Moms. Click here to vote for her.
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