(Winner in the Worst Mother’s Day Gift contest: Jana, who was commenter #9. Yay, Jana!)

This is the fourth in a series of periodic posts in which I test out easy, inexpensive, low-mess, low-parental-involvement activities for young children to do. In the first, I tested, um, dry pasta in cake pans. In the second: painting with water. The third: marshmallows and toothpicks. Today’s test: unspilly stuff in a bowl.

Intention
The preschool-aged child will satisfy her seemingly endless Stirring Impulses, without wasting food or getting any more flour behind the cupboards.
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This is the third in a series of periodic posts in which I test out easy, inexpensive, low-mess, low-parental-involvement activities for young children to do. In the first, I tested, um, dry pasta in cake pans. In the second: painting with water. Today’s test: marshmallows and toothpicks.  This would be, of course, for children who are no longer in the young “trying to kill themselves with everything that exists” stage; my test children were both aged 3.75 years.

Intention
The children will make structures with the marshmallows and toothpicks, without eating the marshmallows or poking themselves with the toothpicks, and will thus justify my impulse buy of pastel, bunny-shaped marshmallows
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‘Tis the season for this blog to start talking about gift ideas and tips for surviving the holidays without blowing your budget or losing your mind. There’s a lot of great stuff already lurking in the gift category archives, and we’ll be posting more entries on this subject over the next few weeks.

I see I wrote a post almost a year ago on charitable gift ideas, which is sort of what I planned to talk about today. More specifically, how do you get your kids to embrace charity, in the middle of a season designed to overload their brains with GIMME? My own children are too young to fully grok the notion of . . . well, much of anything about the holidays yet (my 3-year-old just asked me this morning if Santa was a pirate. I guess “Ho ho ho” does sound a lot like “Yo ho ho”), but I’d definitely like to create some traditions that involve all of us thinking about more than just our Amazon wish lists each year. Here’s a few activities I’ve been thinking would be good to do with kids during the holiday season:

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