Help your kids develop - use playdough

Most kids love playing with playdough but we recently found out that this activity is also a fantastic way to develop and enhance fine motor skills. Playing with playdough is particularly useful for toddlers and preschoolers to develop skills which will help them with writing and drawing. When the kids are a little older, get them to make letters and write their name with dough! Great fun and the perfect educational activity! So get stuck into playdough! Here's a super simple recipe to make your own playdough:

What you need:

• 2 cups of baking soda
  
• 1 1/2 cup of water
  
• 1 cup of corn starch
  
• food coloring (if you want to give your dough some color)

What to do:
1. Mix the ingredients with a fork or whisk
2. Pour into a pot and boil until the mixture congeals (should take only a few minutes)

Done!

Enjoy,

Sef

A dad's guide to stain removal (... yes we are serious)

If you have a toddler or an active young person then changing their clothes 3-4 times per day might seem like the norm? Well apart from putting them in dirt proof clothes you're probably also doing a lot of washing and may wonder how to get some of those damn stains out ...

Well, fear not, as usual DIYFather boldly goes where no dad has gone before ... a recent investigation into why our clothes are getting ruined and how to get rid off all sorts of nasty stains has revealed this very valuable information below. This should actually be in ALL parenting books (and yes we will put it in the 2nd edition of Call Me Dad). The stain removal tips will hopefully help you save some of the clothes for round 2 or make for a presentable item on your next clothes swap event. OK - here it goes - make sure that you treat the stains ASAP and they actually come out (I tried!!!)

Adhesive Tape

Tech dads and lullabies

If you are having issues with getting your little one to sleep why not try out some video lullabies like the one below. Set up your laptop or tablet computer in the nursery so your little one can hear the song and/or see the screen. Try it out (certainly put me to sleep ...)

There's heaps more on youtube - just search for "lullabies".

Enjoy,

Stef

Christmas baking daddy style - 10 unusual cookie cutters

In many countries Christmas is a traditional time for cooking and baking. Cooking and baking with kids is of course a top activity and so here's some inspirations to liven up the cookie cutting (see below for a super simple recipe that you can use to make cookie cutter cookies).

Dino pasta

Here's another example of great innovation on the "food for kids" front ... Dinosaur Pasta. I can't believe nobody else thought of this earlier. Take two things lots of young kids like best and put them together - genius! The "Kids Pasta" range is made by a German pasta manufaturing company (Alb Gold) and is exported to lots of places around the world. So there's a good chance you'll be able to get it wherever you live (check out this store locator in the US).

Does it work?

Timers – the ultimate ace up your sleeve

Some days parenting comes down to a very simple question. How do you get your kids to do something they don’t want to do? So we come up with tricks, treats, threats and cheats. Sometimes they work, then they don’t … and because there are always days when nothing works it’s useful to have a few tricks up your sleeve that you only use in real emergency situations.

One of the ultimate tricks (we found) is using an egg timer (or any timer / alarm clock). A timer suddenly adds a sense of urgency to a given situation. When it goes off there’s a clear signal that something else needs to happen. Combined with an element of competition (“I bet you can’t get dressed before the timer goes off”) often works a treat for ambitious preschoolers who are only too keen to show off.

Child car seat safety

The loss of a child is the single thing that scares parents the most. We often obsess over ways to keep our children safe. We buy plastic doodads to plug into electrical sockets to keep little fingers away, we put poisons and chemicals out of reach and special childproof locks on cabinets, and, of course, we put our children in child safety car seats. What we often fail to do, however, is get expert help with car seat installation. Studies from the Center for Disease Control have shown that motor vehicle injuries are the greatest public health problem for children. When correctly installed, child safety seats reduce the risk of death by more than 70 percent for infants and more than 43 percent for children aged 1 to 4!

Improving car seat safety

Toddlers are the new teens - music

More evidence that toddlers are the new teens ... in our generation most kids wouldn't really get into the latest songs and artists until they were in their teens. That's very last century now. These days any kind of music is played to kids and babies of all ages, pretty much right from when they are born. As a result toddlers are now happily singing cover songs of the latest hits ... here's an example:

You can pretty much search for any song on YouTube and just add "3 year old" at the end of the song title and you'll get a version sung by a toddler.

Funny.

-Stef

Keeping babies entertained - paper

More evidence that expensive toys are not needed to entertain babies ... the clips below have clocked up over 70m youtube views (!)

Enjoy,

stef

Playtime with dad - pick up sticks

Here's another "forgotten game" (or so it seems) from the previous generation of parents and kids - "pick up sticks". Remember that? It's such a simple concept and you can even play it with leftover chopsticks from all those take aways (or BBQ skewers). I also just found out that someone had the bright idea of making an outdoors version of pick up sticks "garden pick up sticks". Awesome.

Here are the Rules for Pick-up Sticks (in case you don't know):
First, stand the sticks upright holding them all vertically with one hand. Then, let go gently and allow them to drop where they may. Each player's goal is to pick up as many sticks as they can without making the other sticks move.

That's it - super simple but super fun with children and it also developers their fine motor skills (and yours probably) :-)

Enjoy,

Stef