The Wheeler Family Adventure: "Borrowing" Fun Activity Ideas on Pinterest

With the crazy winter weather and the plethora of late starts, early dismissals and just plain old school cancellations, I've had plenty of time to use ideas from Pinterest to help keep my kids occupied during those extra, unexpected family times.

Pinterest is a website that acts like a corkboard. If I find an article I want to read later or a recipe I'd like to try in a few weeks, I can "pin" it. Then, later, I can look at my different corkboards to see what's there. Pinterest also allows me to search other people's digital corkboards to see what they've pinned. So I've been searching these other boards to get some really great activity ideas I can do with the kids on these snow days. The fact that Mark Dayton called off school days in advance was fabulous for actually planning ahead.

A few years ago, at a graduation open house, one gal had a "photo booth." She and her family had provided props like hats, feather boas, oversized plastic glasses, pitchforks, picture frames, fake lips, mustaches and more so people could dress up and have their photo taken as a memento for the graduate. Our family had a blast and various members went back more than once.

So, as I was surfing Pinterest, I came across a few boards created by bloggers who had already searched the internet and pinned photo booth printables. These are 8.5 x 11 inch documents that have things like fake noses, mustaches, reindeer antlers, and hats that you can cut out and turn into props for your own photo booth at home.

So Sunday night, I printed off about eight sheets of these printables, including a copy of the hat Princess Beatrice wore to Prince William's wedding. Then Monday morning, the girls picked which ones they wanted to use and cut those out; we attached these props to pencils and wooden skewers. (The directions called for dowels, but I didn't have any handy so we improvised.) That took about an hour or so. We also threw in a couple props like a Santa hat and dolls.

Some of the samples I had seen online included cute backdrops of fun wallpaper taped to a wall or more involved backdrops with white Christmas lights behind sheets. We settled for a blank wall and moved our couch in the living room so we could pose in front of the only blank wall in the house.

We had a blast! Annika has a fascination with mustaches so she donned a top hat and mustache and created a mustache for her 18-inch doll as well. Emily chose the Santa hat and beard. Lauren, at one point, was Santa's helper, and Megan was a reindeer, a cowboy and an elf throughout our shoot.

During the rest of the day, we made our own pizzas on pita bread (great tasting with a good crunch and just the right size) which we have done before and then played a customized bingo I had made on freebingomaker.com using words that I knew our newest six-year-old could read like her sisters' names, our street name, and color words. I got that website off of Pinterest as well.

My cousin used Pinterest for wedding planning ideas; friends use it for home decor tips. I use it for kid activities as well as recipes. And a company I work for uses Pinterest as a way to pin articles and activities that are relevant to training and development so other trainers can easily borrow ideas, too. As long as what you want to pin has a picture, you can pin it.

The moral of the story is that if you are online, check out Pinterest. It's a great place to resource ideas and not recreate the wheel.

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Of course, we've also had Christmas and three birthdays since the last blog post, too, so here are a few pics from those.