How to Entertain Your Kids This Summer

Hey, parents! Are you tired of coming up with novel ways to entertain your kids this summer? Do you want to choke the next person posting pictures to Facebook of the creative art project they are doing with their children while yours are in the middle of a 5 hour SpongeBob marathon losing brain cells by the minute? Do you feel like there are just not enough popsicle sticks in the world to actually complete that kid's craft you saw on Pinterest? I know I answer with an emphatic yes to all of the above. I’ve even tried to make the mundane tasks of cleaning and grocery shopping fun, but it turns out kids see right through that shit knowing good and well that I am no Mary Poppins. (And while we’re at it, screw you Mary Poppins for making it all seem so easy. I’d be a hit with the kids too if I had dancing penguins to follow me around, but it’s Oklahoma and penguins are hard to come by, dancing or otherwise.)

But I digress. I have come up with one way to deal with hyper children over the summer. I call this game “Put the kids in the closet”. They’re quiet, they’re contained. Hell, I read a whole book chapter while my kids were safely stored in the closet.

Ok, so I can’t claim credit for this game. What really happened was that Hudson yelled at me from upstairs and asked me come upstairs and look at something. I was less than enthused since he asked me this several times today, sometimes with only a minute or two between requests, but when he added “I taught Kenzie something” I knew this would be interesting. I opened the bathroom closet door to find this.

Although I am not the kind of parent who actually stores her kids in a closet, I am the kind of person who first grabbed her cell phone to take a picture before I told them to never ever do this again.

The Civil War Had Pirates

In Italy, their version of the American Civil War is a bit...different. I found this in a toy store in Florence.

I believe that there's a pirate, the little know third contender in the Civil War. Obviously, the pirates got involved in the Civil War when the federal government wanted to tax their booty.  The pirates felt that this was unfair and told the government, "Hands off of our booty!". They really felt this was federal overreach, groping if you will. 

Fun fact about the pirates in the civil war. When they ran into battle they would do so with a loud war cry. This was called the "booty call".

Sadly, their fight came to a quick end due to an unfortunate uniform choice.  See, you would assume that buckle says US for United States, but really it just said us. When the other side's uniforms didn't say "them" on them, they got confused forcing them to quickly back that thang up and retreat.

According to the box, this figure is one of four. We can only hope that one of the other three is something equally awesome like a Jedi.