Evolving activity bags
Tiffany shares her experience in managing the hectic schedule of children's sports as a parent. With her daughter's volleyball tournaments and practices often taking her family on long drives and extended periods of waiting, Tiffany reveals her number one tip for keeping her younger children engaged and content during these events.
From creating a curated backpack filled with new and exciting activities to incorporating a variety of fun and affordable items, she provides invaluable insights for other parents navigating similar challenges. Tune in to this insightful minisode for practical tips on making club sports more enjoyable and manageable for the entire family.
Timestamps:
[00:00:23] Managing younger kids while attending tournaments and practices
[00:01:02] Number one tip for keeping younger kids entertained
[00:02:52] A backpack filled with various activities and snacks
[00:04:49] Closing
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:01]:Welcome to scare confident. I'm your host, Tiffany Souder. So I have shared with you before that my second one is a volleyball player, and with that comes club sports schedule. AAU. It's club. It's called club and volleyball. I think basketball to AAU, but you get the idea. Like, we spend six months with kind of a bonkers commitment that we've all made.
Tiffany Sauder [00:00:23]:And I have two kids, young, younger than her, and so we spend a lot of time. Her practice is a half an hour away. Half of her tournaments are not within an hour of our house. And so it's just a lot of time away for our family. But the people who I would say get it the worst are my littler kids, my eight year old and my three year old, because they are in the car and they are sitting in bleachers. And while they might care for, like, ten minutes a game, for the most part, they just want to be kids and they just want to play. And so I'm sharing my number one tip that I feel like has made this just a way better experience for them. And it helps me get on top of things much more quickly.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:02]:So if you have younger kids, you know that they don't want to watch the game, watch the swimming, watch the whatever. And so you need other things for them to do. Well, one strategy is to hand them an iPad, and I'm not totally too good for that, but it is not my favorite thing to have them do for what can be, like, sometimes three, 4 hours. Like, that is a long time. Your eyeballs are going to fall out of your head. And sometimes they just actually, literally get done with it. And so what I have done instead is I've created a system, as you might expect, in our laundry room, we have, like, these two great big cabinets that open, and I have three big bins in there. One is coloring and notebooks and new crayons and markers where the lid matches the actual marker color.
Tiffany Sauder [00:01:45]:And they all work. Activity books, that kind of stuff. One bin is like little trinkety toys things. So it might be like a Ziploc filled with, like, a mini Barbie and three outfits and a little know or, oh, I'm blanking on the name of those little figurines. They're like elephants and they're like animals. I'm blanking on them, but, like that kind of stuff where they can play make believe, but it's all very contained and there's something to do with them. So the third bin is games. It's like I have a Simon says thing.
Tiffany Sauder [00:02:18]:I have a digital tic tac toe, like, that kind of stuff. And then in my pantry, I have a bin that is, like, to go snacks that are not only filled with sugar. And so when I know we have a tournament that's coming up or practice, we need to drive to or someplace, we need to go where the little kids are going to be sitting for a while, I have a backpack, and I load it with new stuff, quote unquote new stuff. So there's different things in there every single time. And maybe I switch out 50% of it, but you get the point. Every time they open it, they're like, oh, there's something new in here. Oh, I remember this from six weeks ago. Like, oh, I love this little Barbie figurine.
Tiffany Sauder [00:02:52]:And it is a way of keeping them paying attention to this bag. Last year, I feel like what I realized is I had bought stuff for this backpack, and I was like, well, they'll just play with this stuff every single game, every single drive across town, whatever, and they open it up, they're like, I've already seen all this stuff. And they close it and they go back to whining and complaining and wanting to know if they can go to the concession stand. So it has been awesome. So how I keep it filled with stuff is I'll just go to Amazon when I'm ordering other stuff, and I'll search for toys for girls eight to ten years old or whatever, and I'll just add some stuff to cart I hijack and steal away things from their stockings. They'll probably get a Valentine's Day basket from my mom and my mother in law. I'll just have half of that stuff will disappear, and I'll put it in these baskets. If I walk into target and there's, like, the dollar area, I'll run through it and see if there's stuff that might be good to throw in there.
Tiffany Sauder [00:03:47]:So I'm not spending a gajillion dollars at all on this stuff. I found this paint with water book that was of unicorns. It's like painting, but you just dip the water in a brush, which I always have a water bottle and paint. It was a dollar 99. Amazing. So I'm just, like, kind of curating, and we have this basket of stuff, and then this weekend, I had ivy go through it all and throw out all the stuff that's, like, no longer cool. We're done with this. There's no more pages to color.
Tiffany Sauder [00:04:12]:Whatever, because I wanted to feel, like, fresh and curated and exciting when you open it. You remember that as a kid when you open, like, a crisp new box of markers, it was like, this is so rad. A brand new thing of Crayola markers is like 279. It is not expensive. And so I just started to see my little girls as, like, a customer of this experience, too. And I don't have time to drive to target when we're on the way to a tournament because I'm never running early to anything. I don't need to buy everything new. Sometimes it's just like stealing stuff out of your house that they don't play with every single day.
Tiffany Sauder [00:04:49]:That becomes new when you go to these tournaments or you're driving to practice. So, anyway, this is my number one tip to make club sports a little bit more survivable for what might be your younger little kids. I don't actually have any tips for how to make it survivable for parents teasing. It's fun to watch your kid. It's a lot of effort, but it's hilarious. Okay, anyways, that's what we're doing. Thanks.
