CreatifulKids | Creative Activities for Kids and Positive Parenting Tips for Growing Creative and Beautiful Kids

Nasal polyp surgery – diary of a kid’s day at the hospital

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Angela

At the beginning of the week, Victoria was scheduled for a nasal polyp surgery. A common surgery to remove the polyps when they block too much of the airway and therefore cause snoring (and bad sleep) and frequent colds.

As this was the first time for one of our children to get a surgery, we (concerned parents)were both present and definitly were more stressed than our brave girl. For her all this was an adventure and she was very curious abour everything.

Here’s a little summary of the day:

9h30 – After not eating or drinking anything we check-in at the hospital and Victoria got dressed in the typical (kid size) hospital shirt. Doesn’t she look great!

10h30 – We’re all watching cartoons while waiting for her surgery. I guess at this point she must have been in heaven as we don’t have a TV at home and she got to zapp on whatever cartoon channel she wanted.

11h00 Off we go for the surgery. After a little chat with our nice doctor, a nurse takes Victoria in her arms and she gets to wave goodbye a last time and then she’s gone. But even before we get to finish our coffee in the waiting room, we’re called back in as the surgery was over. I didn’t check the time, but would be surpirsed if the surgery took more than 10 minutes.

11h30 – Now the harder part comes, when Victoria tried to wake up from the narcotics ( she had full anesthesia). Because she is confused and in pain, she cries and despite our efforts there was not much we could do to confort her. She only calmed down and fell back into sleep after the nurses gave her some pink painkiller sirop. She doesn’t remember any of this now, but this is where it got hard on us, the parents.

12h00 – By this time she was sleeping and all 3 got back to our hospital room and had a restfull and relaxed 45min. In this time we got a visit from our doctor that reassured us that all went well and that our little girl will feel better when she’ll wake up.

13h00 Victoria is fully awake. When we asked her how was the surgery, she looked at us with surprise. “Surgery? Who had surgery? ” She smiles, feels good and doesn’t even remember waving to us when she was taken into the surgery area. She is very happy to eat her icecream (the first meal of the day for her) – the only proof left of the surgery is the needle that sticks out of her arm.

14h00 She drank, she ate and she peed. 3 times tick in the box so we can go home. In our concern about the pain she would go through, we had bought her a bag of candies (our kids usually don’t get much of those, so it is very special for her). In the end we feel like we’ve gone through more pain than she did, but we give her the candies anyway 🙂

(By the way, it was a pleasure to hear her sleeping some nights later without making a single noise. Gone is the noisy snoring.)

Big thanks for Dr Peter Iwens for the surgery and the before and after care and to Victoria for being such a brave girl!

Posted in Parenting | Tagged Parenting tips, positive parenting tips | 1 Comment

How to Make Cardboard Castles for Kids – Crafts With Cardboard

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Angela

We did some crafts with cardboard lately, so here you can see how to make cardboard castles for kids, which they’ll love to make and play with.

Some time ago we did some crafts with cardboard and had lots of fun with a cardboard box which we turned into a castle. Well …Victoria was so enthusiastic that she actually told it to Laura – a good friend of hers – and when Laura came to visit, we absolutely HAD TO show her how to make cardboard castles.

The first time was big fun already, but this time was even better. And that’s because we did it a little different …

The procedure and so stayed very much the same as for the first cardboard castle we did, but this time I left it much more up to the kids to do their own thing for their crafts with cardboard play time.

Last time I did most of the drawing to make sure the castle would look like a castle, but this time I let the two girls exercise drawing the straight and curbed lines of the windows, walls and gate.

I could still do some corrections on the cardboard castle design during the cutting part, but I didn’t even have to correct much. The girls also did the whole painting part by themselves, which game me some time to relax and have my afternoon coffee :-). Of course the making of the cardboard castle ended up taking more time and being way messier -and waaaay too pink for my standards – but they loved it and the result is great!

I got reminded that I should not intervene too much in the children’s play and I should let them discover and do things their own way. After all the most important is to have fun and experiment.

So you want my opinion on how to make cardboard castles? If your kids are younger get involve and make the cardboard castles with them, but if they are older, just give them the tools they need and let them create!

Enjoy your children crafts with cardboard and watch them have fun with this self made cardboard toy.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged Cardboard boxes, castle crafts, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard, Creative play, positive parenting tips | 1 Comment

How to Teach Patience to Children

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Angela

How to teach patience to children and how to handle difficult situations. This is our ‘count to 30’ approach that help us teach our kids about patience and sharing.

In my post on patience and sharing, I touched quickly on 5 ideas on how to handle tough situations with small kids being impatient or fighting over some toys or other stuff. Here I will explain you some more on our counting method to get our kids to wait for their turn.

When having two or more small kids play together, it often ends up with both of them wanting to play with the same toy (or the same baby as in the picture below). It’s typical situation when your attention is drawn by lots of screaming and you see many little hands pulling on the same object.

How to teach patience to children? Who had the toy first? Who started the fight? No clue and our kids are usually of no help to answer these. So let’s forget about that!

I tried google for suggestions and I ended up mostly with stuff as ‘Take the toy away’, ‘lock them both in their room’, … I was not really satisfied with these solutions and felt that there must be better ways to do this and a smarter way of how to teach patience to children. What I do at home is that I try teaching our kids to share and see (most of) their toys as common toys, rather than just theirs. Nowadays when Victoria gets a present she would spontaneously say it’s also of Lukas and Elena. With this in mind and after some trial and error, I came up with the idea and successfully implemented the ‘count to 30’ approach.

1- How to teach patience to children: Get their attention.

The issue at hand in these situations is that the kids want the toy NOW (the other can play also, but me first) and they are so stuck on that, that they don’t have much time to listen to you. What I discovered with our kids is that I need to create an opening, get their attention. So what I do is that I let one of the kids play with the toy (that’s already one that stops screaming) and focus my attention on the other. To stop the crying and screaming I take number two in my arms, confirm that he/she will get the toy and that daddy, or mommy, will help to get the toy.

(Picture above: who gets to play first with the doll bed?)

2- How to teach patience to children: Agree on waiting together and count to 30.

I tell both of them that daddy will count to 30 and then number 1 has to give the toy to number 2. I then start counting and when getting close to 30, I give it a little climax (intonation, counting louder) and have them hand over the toy when I reach 30. To my surprise in the beginning, I didn’t need to force things -they would hand the toy over voluntarily. I might need to repeat the procedure a couple of times though until one of the two looses interest in the toy.

They’ve gotten so used to it by now that it takes no more explaining, I just start counting and they get along with it. And only in seldom cases do I actually get to 30, usually the toy changes hands long before I get there.

Why 30? I guess it was the inspiration of the moment 😉 . At the time I started this, none of our kids could count that far which left me in control of the ‘counting part’. I would count faster or slower depending on the urgency of the situation. I felt like having this 30 deadline gives the comfort to number 2 that he will get the toy and thus it calms him down. In the same time, this gives sufficient time to number 1 to enjoy playing with the toy in peace. I have noticed also that as soon as number 2 stops fighting for it, most of the time the toy already seems less interesting for number 1. And hey, as a positive side-effect, the kids learn how to count 🙂

Do you have any tricks on how to teach patience to children and how to handle kiddie disputes?

Posted in Parenting | Tagged activities for children, Conflict solving, Parenting tips, Patience with children, positive parenting tips, Toy sharing | 3 Comments

Preschool Activities – Playing with Wet Colored Chalk

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Angela

I was looking for some easy preschool activities to entertain two little girls for an afternoon, and I did not expect they’d have so much fun playing with plain old colored chalk.

Did it ever happen to you that forgotten things just lay around and suddenly get interesting again? This happened to us with our collection of colored chalk. Out of no where it became one of these super fun preschool activities that got me surprised.

A while ago I bought some colorful chalk for the kids to play outside in our small courtyard. But they never showed a too big enthusiasm for these kind of preschool activities. “Maybe it is because the tiles of the courtyard are not that smooth so they don’t like to draw on them….” I told myself and thought to put the pieces back in the box. But I didn’t do it – let’s call it “lack of prioritization”- and the chalk pieces ended up just laying ignored outside in the courtyard. Up until Laura – a good friend of Victoria – came to visit.

That day, it rained in the morning but the afternoon turned up sunny and warm, so the kids went to play outside. Laura spotted the wet chalk, tried it out and WOW! Soon both girls were very busy redecorating the courtyard. The fact that the chalk was wet made the difference and made their play one of these unexpectedly great preschool activities. The colors were brighter and the chalk was spreading smoother on the stone tiles which i guess made it more interesting for the girls.

The pavement ended up not being enough for their fun, they also painted rainbows and flowers on the walls – which I don’t mind too much as mother nature will take care of the clean-up as soon as a heavy rain comes our way.

With Laura’s help and the rain, my kids rediscovered the magic of chalk painting. And what fun preschool activity that was!

If you want to have a look at other great preschool activities we did with the kids, check out this easy to make chalk paint that was also lots of fun!

Posted in Toys-apps-games | Tagged Creative play, Outdoor play | 1 Comment

Positive Parenting Tips: Teaching Kids about Patience and Sharing

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Angela

If you’re looking for some positive positive-parenting-tips tips, try teaching your kids about patience and sharing.

Patience and sharing are two wonderful skills which I believe each parent wants their kids to have.
However at what age do they really kick in? Not in the first 4 years of life, according to our experience with the kids. But then again, looking at how many adults around me still seem to struggle with the concept of patience and/or sharing, I shouldn’t have too high expectations for my kids …These are our positive positive-parenting-tips tips for raising young children.

You might have read the story about the mothers day present of my daughter. That’s the kind of situations where lack of patience actually leads to funny situations.

Victoria came home from school on Friday with a present which was supposed to be given to mommy on Sunday. We spent about an hour that evening having fun with Victoria repeating over and over again the following sequence: hiding the present, asking us if we want to see it, taking it back again, asking mommy if she wants to open it, telling her with a big smile on her face that she can not open it yet to then hide it once again.

As you could read, the present didn’t make it till actual mothers’ day on Sunday 🙂

However it is more likely for the lack of patience and sharing to end up like this, and if that is the case the below positive positive-parenting-tips tips might came in handy:

The above series of pictures covers a crying session of Lukas when he couldn’t get the brush Victoria was playing with outside on our courtyard. Drama! Playing together with it was obviously out of the question … and so was waiting for his turn.

How do you deal with these kinds of situations? Over time we developed a couple of positive positive-parenting-tips tips and tricks depending on the type of problem at hand:

Counting as a way to have them be patient to wait for their turn
Storytelling for when you want them to go along with you on something
Duplicating the so-wanted-toy so they both get to play with it in the same time
Saying ‘yes, but later’ rather than saying ‘no’
Get them involved in what you are doing if you are not yet ready to give them what they want

What we want to get to is kids playing nice together like Victoria and Elena do here:

We’ll be covering each of these positive positive-parenting-tips tips and tricks in more detail with some examples, and cute pictures, later on in separate posts.

You have some positive positive-parenting-tips tips and suggestions of your own? Share them with us by commenting below.

Posted in Parenting | Tagged Parenting tips, Problem solving | 3 Comments

Make an Egg Carton Car and Paper Roll Driver – Easy Egg Carton Crafts for Kids

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Angela

Have fun with some paper rolls and egg carton crafts for kids: Make an egg carton car and driver.

If you’re looking for some easy egg carton crafts for kids and you happen to also have some toilet paper rolls, have a look at what we managed to do with these simple materials!

First let me introduce the scene: I was alone having 2 grumpy kids in a rainy morning. No matter what Victoria or Lukas did, the other one wanted to do exactly the same. I could see that the situation would get soon out of control with Victoria and Lukas.

So I decided to do some easy egg carton crafts for kids. Lukas was not in a “crafty mood” but Victoria was happy to do some egg carton crafts for her little brother. The egg cartoon crafts project of the day was a car out of an egg carton box and it’s driver out of toilet paper roll.

What we used for this egg carton craft:

An egg carton box for the car
A toilet paper roll for the driver
FischerTip for the hair
Glue and groggy eyes
Brushes and water paint

First Victoria drew a circle on the egg carton for the driver seat and while I cut it out, she started painting the driver.

Soon, Lukas decided to join the egg carton crafts we were doing, but he couldn’t be bothered with painting the car – mixing colors was all he needed to keep himself entertained. And so my kids enjoyed spending some time together while they were actually playing independent from each other.

When our egg carton creations got dry Victoria glued some groggy eyes on the driver and decided to make some hair out of FischerTip (lovely product, if you don’t have this at home, you should ;-)). Since we did this car and driver for Lukas, he got to choose the color of the hair and we used the opportunity to exercise a bit the colors.

Allow me to introduce to you to our blue haired paper roll driver and his cool egg carton car!

Please notice the cool functionality of the egg carton box in the third picture where the driver gets to check the engine of his car.

Once all the artwork was done and dried, it was time to play!

Victoria wanted to play with the driver from a “different perspective” so she made him drive upside-down. But then she concluded that it is not very nice for our guy to drive like this, as he might get a headache. And on top it was not that safe either because he does not have a seat belt on. She seems quite taken by safety, like the tile when we had to re-enforce the balcony of our cardboard castle to keep the princess safe.

In his turn, Lukas was interested in driving around with the egg carton car, and playing with the handy driver – who had to check quite often the engine of the car.

We had fun with our egg carton crafts for kids and it helped me get over a long morning with two grumpy kids. Do you do any egg carton crafts for kids?

If you like to do different egg carton crafts for kids, have a look also at this plane from egg carton and toilet paper rolls.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged coloring and drawing, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard, crafts with toilet paper rolls, crafts with toilet rolls, Creative play, Easter activities, easter crafts for kids, egg carton crafts for kids, ideas for craft activity with kids, kids crafts, painting, paper crafts | 2 Comments

The fun about raising kids … is being taught new kiddy logic!

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Angela

… is being taught new logic by your kids!

And so while in the car with my daughter today, I learned that I need to get stronger in order to be able to whistle. I’ve never been able to whistle and since I don’t consider it a very important skill, I have to admit I haven’t tried very much either. But the fact that juf Hilde, Victoria’s teacher at school, can whistle, but her daddy can’t, seems the most normal thing for my daughter; because Juf Hilde is stronger than daddy.

Conclusion: Daddy needs to get stronger. And how is daddy supposed to do that? “Daddy needs to drink a lot” is the answer I get from a very serious Victoria. I also need to exercise according to her, but drinking a lot is definitely the most important part.

I find it amazing how kids manage sometimes to ‘think out of the box’ because they haven’t actually learned yet to ‘think in the box’.

How else would our son Lukas come to find this a comfortable place for a rest?

Or how else would Victoria get to the idea to place herself an her chair on top of the sofa?

Conclusion: Kids = fun guaranteed!

Posted in Parenting | Tagged positive parenting tips | Comments Off

A perfect mothers day present

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Angela

My daughter’s mothers day present turned out different than planned.

Tomorrow it’s mothers day and -as most kids her age-Victoria made a mothers day present for me and learned a poem. During the week we’ve heard the poem a couple of times a day. That week all conversations turned around the the mothers day present she did.

Friday was the day she took the mothers day present home and she hid it behind her back all the way from school as I was not supposed to see it. She was super enthusiastic to give me this mothers day present and was playing with my curiosity:

“Mommy, do you think I have a mothers day present for you?” … “Can you guess what your mothers day present is?” … “I’m not showing you the mothers day present”…

When we got home with her mothers day present, she put the present under the sofa and made me look for it all over the house but strictly prohibited me to look under the sofa 😉

We were supposed to sleep 2 more nights before I could open my mothers day present on Sunday, but that did not quite work out. After lots of fun Friday evening with taking the present and hiding it over and over again, on Saturday morning Victoria gave me my mothers day present to open it. She told me that it is OK to open it as long as we don’t tell daddy, because daddy will tell it to Juf Hilde – her teacher from school – that we opened my mothers day present earlier and that would not be good.

Anyway, I happily opened the mothers day present to find that they have made a scent box at school. It was nicely decorated with pink flowers on the top and painted pieces on the side and of course some nice smelling dried flowers inside. Victoria explained me that this was for the toilet or the kitchen so she asked me to choose where she should put it. I told her I’d like to have it in the toilet so she went there and few minutes later she came back with the empty box. From the fact that I did hear the toilet flushing just before, I kind of understood what happened, but I still asked Victoria where she had put the flowers. And she replied very serene: “In the toilet mommy, just like you said.” Well yeah … just like I said.

So this mother’s day present did not turn out how it was supposed to be, but instead I received a nice box decorated by my daughter and one of the funniest memories I have with my kids. What a perfect mothers day present!

What was your favorite mothers day present you received from your kids?

Posted in Parenting | Tagged positive parenting tips | 4 Comments

Small surprises can make your day

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Angela

Sometimes playgrounds for kids are hidden just behind your house

Some days come with nice surprises. And so it was last Sunday. At first there was the clear blue sky which came unexpectedly after lunch time. The day before we had taken the kids along on a shopping trip at the supermarket just to get them out of the house. This Sunday was offering us enough sun to get out to the park.

And why not try a new park? I remembered reading something about a new playground the commune opened a couple of weeks before. So why not check it out? Turned out the playground was not that interesting for us. But there I was on the youth site of Hoeilaart, having a list of all the playgrounds. And that’s where the second surprise kicked in. There had been all along a nice, quite big, playground, right behind our house. A mere 400 meters to walk and right there, hidden in a quiet residential area was a superb playground. Happiness all around; for our kids because they finally got to play outside and for us because we found a playground which doesn’t require taking any busy and dangerous roads!

Our kids had almost the entire playground for themselves, except for another father with his two kids playing outside. And that’s where the 3rd surprise hit us. The usual parent-kid-playground talking quickly showed that we were next to a Romanian family. This is such a rare occasion that it took a while for our kids to get used to it. Having mostly Dutch or French speaking kids around, they wouldn’t acknowledge that these kids were speaking Romanian and it took them about half an hour to make the switch and start conversation in mommy’s language. And so we ended up spending quite more time on a playground we didn’t know of, on an unexpected sunny day in unexpected company.

This made us realize that small surprises can be amazing and make your day and that it’s worth checking online what the commune has to offer in the neighborhood.

Posted in Parenting | Tagged positive parenting tips | Comments Off

Crafts with Cardboard – How to Make a Castle out of Cardboard

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Angela

If you have some cardboard boxes, keep them for some future crafts with cardboard. See how my kids managed to make a castle out of cardboard.

Last weekend was one of those rainy and chilly spring days. While being stranded indoors, I thought of doing some crafts with cardboard with the kids. The kids decided they wanted to learn how to make a castle out of cardboard.

What we used to make a castle out of cardboard:

A cardboard box
A paper cutter knife and a pencil
Water paint and brushes

We carefully chose a cardboard box for this cardboard craft. As the box was not that big, I taped the corners with masking tape to give it more height. I did the same on any shiny part of the cardboard box where paint wouldn’t stick.

Together with Victoria and Lukas we decided on the colors to use for the different sides of our castle out of cardboard. This is an easy craft idea for kids. Once everything was nicely painted, the hardest part was actually the “waiting” to let the paint dry, before I could draw the castle gate and windows.

Together we discussed where the gate should be, how many windows should the cardboard castle have and where to place them, and finally how to cut the gate and windows. Victoria insisted that the windows need to have shutters, so that they can be closed during the night when it gets cold.

It was a good thing we discussed about this before I started cutting, because my view on how to make a castle out of cardboard was very different than Victoria’s: in my mind the windows would have been big and with no shutters. If I would have started cutting my big windows I bet she wouldn’t have been too happy.

So now all was left for me to do was the actual cutting under the tight supervision of Victoria . Then we all did together the gate chain of the cardboard box castle. I also made a balcony and then I god scolded by Victoria. The was upset because the balcony of her cardboard castle was not safe and that the princess could fall. What can I say… she was right. So we agreed that we’d take care of the safety issue later, and for now the princess just had to take care and not fall from the balcony.

Now that we had a nice looking castle out of cardboard it was time to play. A princess and loads of mini-smurfs was all we needed and soon we had a big story going on in the castle.

First I was involved in the play but then I just sneaked out and to my delight Lukas and Victoria continued playing together, discussing and building on each other’s story.

The next day, we did take care of that “safety issue” with the balcony. Victoria decided to use some FischerTip to fix the balcony and some leftover stickers from Easter to further decorate the castle. All in all we got ourselves a quite nice creation! don’t you think?

What have we learned from this creative activity with cardboard:

We learned about cause and effect,
Discussed about safety,
Understood that sometimes we need to have patience and
We used our creativity and imagination

This is definitely one of those crafts with cardboard that should to be repeated!

At kindergarten Victoria’s symbol is a castle, so she was quite enthusiastic learn how to make a castle out of cardboard. We got some inspiration for our castle from this cardboard castle.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged Cardboard boxes, castle crafts, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard, Creative play | 4 Comments