Real-life reviews from parents.
Explore our lists & add your tips.

Octopus is a variation on swimming pool tag that is especially fun to play with a lot of people. One person starts off as the Octopus, and tries to tag all the other players as they swim across the pool. When a player is tagged, that player and the Octopus have to hold hands, and work together to keep trying to tag other players. Anyone who is tagged joins the Octopus chain, and everyone in the chain has to hold hands in order to tag the other players. If too many players join the chain (making it difficult to swim), you can break up into multiple Octopus chains.

Keepy Uppy is an equally fun game to play in the pool as it is out of the pool! Just keep a beach ball (or two or three) up in the air as long as possible.

How to grocery shop and make simple meals with the stove and oven - eggs, pancakes, sandwiches, pizza, chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, cutting/peeling fruits and vegetables

How to do laundry!

Involve them however you can, so they have some choice in the process. For us, it is often picking the story we read, or the number of books we read (within reason), as well as which kid goes first to brush teeth or take their bath.

Consistency is a key factor !

What did the shark say when it ate the clown fish? Tastes funny.

Why does a duck have feathers? To cover his butt quack

I bought peepee teepees and used one once. Receiving blankets. Used maybe once or twice. Baby nail file! As much as I have to admit it...just get clippers and suck up the fear of cutting their nails. The files don’t work very well.

Blankets, quilts. Used swaddling blankets only.

If there are six apples and you take away four, how many apples do you have? Four.

The more you take away from me, the bigger I get. What am I? A hole.

Sharks and minnows is fun, and it gets played a lot at school. Players stand along a starting line, and must reach the finish line without being tagged by the shark. Any minnows who are tagged by the shark become sharks, too. Repeat racing across until all remaining minnows have been tagged. The winner is the last minnow to be tagged.

Ghost in the graveyard is an especially fun outside game to play at night in the dark. The object of the game is to find the "ghost." This is the player who is hiding. The player who finds the ghost’s hiding spot yells “Ghost in the Graveyard” to alert the other players as to where this person was hiding. The player who finds the ghost is designated as safe. All the other players must race back to space designated as the base. The ghost tries to tag someone else before they do and that player is IT for the next game.

Annie! A classic for the whole family, always. Kids were 7 and 9 when we saw it, and we were coming out of an obsession with the movies, which made it extra fun!

I love the stage version of Beauty and the Beast! It's just similar enough to the familiar Disney movie for kids to understand everything, but just different enough to keep it fresh. The extra songs are some of my favorites.....and there's nothing like the magic of watching the beast turn into a prince right before your eyes!

Join the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) reciprocal network. Register with a flat yearly fee at your local children's museum (it pays itself off very fast!) and you'll receive 50% off at sooo many children's museums nationwide. (You'll earn free membership at your local museum, too.) Where are you headed? Find a children's museum in the ACM network here: https://findachildrensmuseum.org/

Though dining out is part of the travel experience and something to embrace, we never fail to make a quick grocery store run on day 1 of the trip, especially for breakfast items so we can wake up and casually eat at "home": cereal, milk, bagels, fruit, coffee, etc. This is less expensive (and less time consuming) than eating out every single morning.

Laundry basket or backpack, and laundry detergent.

Towels and bedding, probably for a twin XL, which is the mattress size they use at many colleges. I have seen them stock up on these at Home Goods around the end of summer.