Fourth of July Entertainment Round Up!
posted by Dawn on July 4th, 2008Happy Independence Day! I hope you’re all out enjoying yourselves at parks, barbeques, parties, ballgames, movie theaters, and the like. For those of us who are more likely to spend the holiday at home, I thought it would be nice to piggyback off of Amanda’s super fun post from yesterday with some easy entertainment ideas for you and your family members! I’m not reinventing the wheel here, just having a little fun.
Five summery or patriotic movies you can enjoy with the kids:
- The Sandlot - summer classic about friendships, baseball, and a big scary dog. Includes a great 4th of July scene.
- Field of Dreams - quintessential baseball fantasy with great family relationships and sweet moments to treasure.
- My Girl - sweet, simple story about an important summer in young Vada Sultenfuss’ life (with a Home Alone-era Macaulay Culkin; remember how cute he was?)
- An American Tail - great family animated film about a little mouse who gets separated from his family en route to the States. Lots of history, too!
- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - “It demonstrates democracy in action,” the trailer declares. Experience again this movie classic and tell your children all about the late, great James Stewart. I first saw this in a high school government class. Loved it.
Easy music idea:
If you’re looking for some fun with background music for your holiday dinner, look no further! Make a playlist or mix cd with “freedom”, “summer”, or “America” as your theme. This is especially fun to do with tweens & teens; give them $10 and have them buy 10 songs from an online store to make a mix for the family. Here’s a small sampling of what I found in my iPod with those words in the title:
I played my list at dinner last night and it sparked lots of fun conversation with my dear hubby. Crank it up and enjoy!
Any other film or music suggestions out there? Are you inspired to decorate your house like the one in the picture above? (Yes, that is an actual house in my neighborhood.) Have a great holiday, and for grins, I’ll have Bill Pullman take us out:
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A few weeks ago, The Mom Crowd was given some products from “
Darah and I attended a
The first week of Kindermusik was difficult because Connor didn’t want to attend to anything we were doing and I was split between both children. If I think hard about it though, none of the children were perfectly attending to the class, so I think I probably was more stressed out about it than necessary. Since that first week, the kids have grown so much in their music exploration. Darah really never had much of a problem attending to the group songs and activities like Connor did, but she still has learned how to follow the direction of the teacher, move fast-and-slow, start-and-stop her instrument or movement, transition between songs and activities. Connor, though has grown up so much during our class. The first session, he threw major temper tantrums when it was time to transition. When we would put up the maracas, he would cry and run away with his maracas. When the teacher started singing her “drums away” song, he would grip his drum even harder while crying. I left thinking he just wasn’t mature enough for a group activity like Kindermusik. By week two, he got a little better about it, and even though I would have to pry each instrument away from him when it was time to transition, the crying didn’t turn into all out temper tantrums. By week three, though, he would start putting his instrument up when the teacher started singing the transition song. There were still tears, but he was following direction. Last week, he actually seemed to look forward to the transition to see what was coming next. He eyed the hoola hoops the whole time and every time the transition song would start, he’d clean up and run over to the hoola hoops, hoping this was the transition that was going to lead to them. There were still some tears, but he was in no way uncontrollable, and I loved that he was following direction so well.
2. Every first birthday party must have cake! The theme of our party was flowers, so my husband made two cakes in the shape of a flower. We bought a cake flower pan at Hobby Lobby and used boxed cake mix. We didn’t have time to make a special small cake for Ace so I just cut off one of the petals for her to dig into. No one cared that she didn’t have a special cake to herself.









