Here we are on the fifth day of a week-long journey to bust summer boredom. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments!

Idea 17: How Far Can You Jump? The “I’m bored” whines were beginning moments after breakfast and I could tell the kids needed to get outside, so I immediately declared it a mini Field Day. I laid a yardstick down on the ground and notched off the starting point with chalk. Mommy jumped first, the full 3 feet!

Seeing this made Travis want to take a turn. He landed at 26 inches the first time. But could he beat it? Wow, 32 inches!

He was so proud. Meanwhile it was not even 9 a.m. and I was pleased the kids had already had some sunshine.

Idea 18: Make a Salad Kabob. Travis loved threading food onto a skewer for a recent project so now I challenged him to make his lunch salad in kabob-form. I suggested a pattern of: tomato, cucumber, cheese (we recommend chunks of mozzarella from Miyoko’s kitchen!). But he declared, “I have my own pattern.” Many slices of cucumber and mozzarella followed.

We drizzled with non-dairy ranch dressing for the perfect salad on a stick!

Idea 19: Memorize Five Things. The concept of this one was tricky for Travis (i.e. memorizing five X of any category, be it words in a new language, poems, etc.). I helped him narrow it down to memorizing 5 jokes. Four were Knock Knock jokes, but we threw in one of my corniest favorites from childhood:

Q: What’s gray, and has a trunk?

A: A mouse going on vacation!

Rim shot. We even recorded these onto my phone for little sister Veronika to listen to in the car. 

Idea 20: Learn to Draw a Chameleon. What a strangely specific suggestion this was from Highlights, but I took advantage of Travis’s recent interest in learning to draw Star Wars characters in order to pique his interest in a step-by-step chameleon tutorial.

It was tough for him to understand at first how we were following along line by line. Then he began to grasp how each step made it look more like a chameleon than the step before.

Here’s how mama’s attempt turned out:

After he had mastered the chameleon, he even tried his hand at drawing Jabba the Hutt.

Idea 21: Do a New Hairdo. Travis is hesitant about gels in his hair, so I wondered how this suggestion would pan out. So at first I asked if the kids wanted to set up a doll hair salon. That got a big yes!

We pulled out safety scissors for pretend snipping, along with jars of pretend cream. Then Travis asked for a real hair product. Heck, why not? I let him work all the baby dolls’ hair into big spiky mohawks.

He decided it was so much fun that he was willing to let me run cream through his hair and attempt a mohawk of his own. And of course needed to see in the mirror!