Our tips for the funnest, awesomest Canada Day/Fourth of July family fireworks display
World record-setting fireworks in Dubai by Grucci
Canada Day and the Fourth of July are around the corner, and if your family is anything like ours you’ll be stocking up on armloads of pinwheels, glitter fountains and sparklers to create your own fireworks show at your cottage or in a park. But before you go firing them off all willy-nilly, check out our tips for creating a slicker presentation that will turn blowing stuff up into a cherished family tradition.
But first, a few words about safety. Set off your fireworks in a wide, open space, keep a bucket of sand handy to extinguish errant flames, and have everyone but the designated shooter (i.e. someone sober) seated as far away from the fireworks as humanly possible. Oh, and keep your cats and dogs inside: they have sensitive earsies and don’t like loud fireworks as much as you do. For more safety tips, check out this article (those fathers over at Geek Dad know what they’re talking about). Read more...
Ken Denmead writes about geeky projects parents and kids can do together on the Geek Dad (part of Wired) blog and in the newly released Geek Dad book. As a kid, Ken claims he had ”serious geeky tendencies” but could hold his own at sports (“so I never had sand kicked in my face or anything”). He came from a family of engineers and physicists and had an uncle who got him hooked on The Hobbit by reading it aloud using different voices. He and his dad also built a train track in his bedroom on a piece of plywood that could be folded up against the wall like a Murphy bed. Read more...
Camping is fun, but if you want to make it in-tents (get it?), take all your friends and their kids with you! Bunchland contributor Kessa and Bunch creative director Rebecca Brown are part of a close-knit group of kids and parents who stay bonded though their annual camping trip.
Keep reading and they’ll let you in on the secrets of their tradition, which include a MacGyvered bouncy house, an inter-tent mail system and a child-minding strategy that allows the grownups time to drink beer around a crackling fire.
The pre-planning
The leadup to the big trip usually starts a few months in advance, with the first order of business: booking your campsite. Don’t sleep on this crucial detail, the popular sites fill up fast! Shoot emails back and forth and circulate a shared document (such as a Google doc) where families sign up for cooking and other duties and compare checklists of what to bring, who has what allergies or food preferences and which families have extra flashlights and folding chairs. Read more...
So when we asked Tury to describe some FriendsWithYou-inspired ways for you guys to play with your kids, we were unsurprised that “come home dressed as a magical being” was one of them, but we felt a bit uncertain that they were actually doable, by anyone other than, you know, Tury. So we tried them out ourselves. Read more...
Wanna live on an awesome street where neighbours are friends and kids ride their bikes together (in other words, a playborhood to be proud of)? Get together with your neighbours and organize a block party! Pick a time, set up some tables and chairs and join together for an afternoon of eating, drinking and playing. Block parties are also a great way to raise money for a cause of your ‘hood’s choice, thought they can simply be a way to hang with your nabes outdoors.
The families who make up Toronto’s Brockton Triangle community are no strangers to hanging out and partying together, whether it’s through community gardening, massive yard sales or car sharing. So it should come as no surprise that they know how to throw down at a neighbourhood block party. We got mom Gretel (and designer of awesome kids’ dress-up gear) on the phone so she could share her top three block party planning tips with you. Read more...
Do you follow @ShitMyDadSays on Twitter? If not, you should. Nothing induces more cry-laughing in our lives than this magical gift to the Internet. It started as a simple concept and has become a worldwide phenomenon: Justin Halpern, a 29-year-old living at home, posts his 74-year-old father’s hilariously profane remarks to Twitter. The concept is being turned into a sitcom starring William Shatner, and Justin’s tweets are collected in the Shi* My Dad Says book. When it arrived at Bunchland HQ, it was a great day around here.
When you talk to Justin, two things come as no surprise. One, he’s just as funny as his dad. And two, despite his dad’s almost cartoonishly grouchy ways, father and son have a warm, loving relationship.
Below, Justin shares his tips for pleasing your pops this Father’s Day, whether or not he’s a loveable grump.
1. Understand that dads don’t always care about Father’s Day.Read more...
Sometimes you like a food so much that you want to cook it for your kids. But then they don’t like it, because it’s too salty or too bitter or “weird-looking” or whatever. Janine, a food scientist (yes, this amazing job title actually exists) and classroom science presenter, wants to show you how to experiment with recipes to make them kid-friendly and simultaneously delicious.
Janine doesn’t believe in cooking separate meals for grownups and kids. So she developed a recipe for non-spicy butter paneer masala with peas for her 2-and-a-half-year-old son Charlie. Check out their video and you’ll see it’s so good he comes back for seconds. And adults won’t be stuck eating some bland creation: Janine shows you how to kick up the heat factor a notch for those who are into that kind of thing. Read on for the recipe.
World record-setting fireworks in Dubai by Grucci
