Creative Quality Time

One of my favorite parts of the holidays aside from the fun traditions; the tree trimming, cookie decorating and waiting for that Elf to make an appearance, is time with all of the kids while they’re home from school. I love that our schedules aren’t overly packed and there is minimal rushing around from one activity to the next, even if last minute shopping tends to fill some of our days before Christmas actually arrives.

I cherish our mornings together. Getting breakfast together while Jack, Zoe and Beau play in the living room or at the kitchen table is one of my favorite things. With the back to back rainy days this past week, we’ve really had to get creative with our time inside, something we were fairly used to doing when we lived in Manhattan, but not since moving to paradise, Santa Cruz. Inevitably, we’ll do art projects from paintings to greeting cards to full blown hand-crafted and decorated board games. Zoe is probably our most creatively inclined child, but Jack and Beau also love to make things and draw. When came across the new Kix boxes at Target, I snatched a few up knowing that not only do my kids like Kix, but any kind of art project is welcome in our book. The new boxes have cut-outs in the cardboard with instructions online that match with a story line on the web, or the kids can create their own. My kids loved the built-in characters aspect of these new boxes, but most of all they loved crafting with them and creating story lines to play with each other as well.

The uncomplicated time together when we do art projects is not only easy, but fun and often humorous as well. There’s usually a huge mess to clean up, but the memories I have of all of us listening to music and being creative together is enough to make me wish for rainy days all the time.

Sometimes finding a craft that they all agree on can be tricky, and the preparation can be daunting and time consuming, but it’s always worth it in the end. The Kix interactive packaging and the Kix Adventure stories that go with them are available online or on your mobile devices. They are fun, engaging, and really just an easy and inexpensive way to create time together, whether it’s making Christmas cookies, hanging ornaments on the tree, or simply eating breakfast together and making up fun crafts and stories to go along with them.

Thank you to Kix for sponsoring this post, and thank you for reading!