What do you DO with your DC?

[MooseBreath]

My DC are 4 and nearly 2. We spend a lot of time doing normal things (walks to the park, jigsaws, drawing, puddle jumping, building ramps for Hot Wheels, etc.), but there is a lot of time to fill.

I thought it may be helpful to have a thread with a bunch of more "off the wall" things that parents do to keep the children entertained...

I stick on classical music (Flight of the Bumblebee, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Yakety Sax, etc.) and have the kids dance around the living room as strangely as they can.

Any other activities to try?

Just sit at home and do whatever is there....do they have toys they actually like ?

DS was obsessed with playing with his wooden train track at that age, so we would spend quite a lot of time doing that. Going out and exploring when the weather was good, you can go feed the ducks near us they loved that. Meeting friends in the park to play.

Junk modeling, basically letting them build whatever they want using the clean recycling. Given them glue and paint and let their imagination go wild.
A bucket of water and paintbrush let them 'paint' the garden in the summer. My kids would spend ages doing this. Chalk drawing on the paving slabs in the garden.

Gardening, I liked teaching them to grow things. They like to water the plants they where growing. You don't need much space for this even if you don't have a garden you can grow cress inside and they grow fast so kids can see them grow quickly.

Teach them to sew, 2 maybe to young for this one but I've certainly helped reception age children do basic sewing.

Cooking to, at 2 you can just get them decorating biscuits. But mixing ingredients is definitely possible at 4. They like to eat what they make.

Make play dough (preferably out the back garden if you have one). There's loads of recipes online. The best ones I found use cream of tartare. You can mix food dye to make lots of different colours. The great thing about it is the kids can mix/ measure/ pour the ingredients themselves so even if you don't get it quite right each time it's still a good activity. You can then keep the dough in the fridge.

At that age we were out a lot with scooter or balance bike (and then pedal bike) - my son could easily cover 8 miles with numerous stops. I was very tired much of the time if I recall, but staying indoors was not an option.

Benign neglect at this point of the school holidays 🤣

I don't really do anything with them apart from, when they were younger, read, write or draw with them or do Lego and crafty stuff. Now they're older, I watch TV with, or sing at, them and talk about stuff. Mostly I used to let them get on with playing together and I was there in the background.

Free museums if there are any near you. Open air concerts or films that are often on in big parks during the summer. Making a picnic together then on a walk to eat it. Watching football, even local 5 a side stuff is fun for the littles. Water play, even without a garden, a bucket of water and a toy tea set on the front step can take hours.

lots of good suggestions here.

We went to ikea a lot to follow the arrows and look at the showrooms and get some food. Also Sainsburys. I miss those days, they refuse to go round the supermarket now and I hate online ordering so it’s just a chore and a faff.

We build forts under the dining table with blankets, mud kitchen in the garden and we've built a bug hotel this week. The local park is nice with a lovely play area too. When DS3 was around 7yrs I used to tie wool to things in the house and pretend they were lasers and navigate through them (DH used to go potty 😅).

Oh we love to put different sorts of music on - our favourite was dancing to Irish jig music around the kitchen and making up moves. When she was small, DD liked me to put royal fanfares on Spotify when she came down for breakfast 😂