Top 5 Tips for the WAHM Accompanied by the Top 10 Activities to Keep Children Occupied While You Work During Summer Vacation

Summer vacation for a work at home mom is a time for another transition. As WAHM’s we must adjust our work schedules to fit our lives on a regular basis. It’s so much nicer to be able to adjust our work around our life rather than life around our work. This is why we chose to do it right?

That doesn’t always make it easy though. I want to share with you my tried and true tips to survive the summer vacation with your work schedule! Planning for it saves time, saves sanity.

Top 5 tips, tried and true by yours truly:

1. Cut back hours if at all possible, add an additional day off. (This works very well for me)
2. Plan hours when the children are still sleeping, nap time, at friends house or if your spouse is home to watch them.
3. Make a weekly to do list and break it down into manageable daily to do list. (You can always pull more if you have time each day)
4. Involve the children on a level they can help you while you work (works for 3 of mine ages 7 to 16)

For the times you must work, such as deadlines and such while the children are active and home with no alternative, there are things you can do to keep your children busy while you work. Make sure you move your office area to a comfortable area for your children or grab your laptop and work at the kitchen table.

This way you can work after you get them started on projects and keep them near enough to watch over. This is a win, win situation BUT it doesn’t work on a daily basis. Nice days of summer don’t allow for the patience of children to sit and do indoor projects daily…this is being realistic.

These are the Top 10 Activities we do, that give me up to 2 hours of work at a time, sometimes more:

1. Lego projects:  We build cities, jungles, ships and various other kids suggested things.
2. Paint projects: I get a couple big poster boards & specific themes for them to take their time and paint.
3. Foam art projects: We have a Dollar Store with foam craft supplies. We do frig magnets to journals.
4. Rock art projects: Pet rocks are our favorites, we couple this with foam art to make lil houses and stuff for the rock pets.
5. Coloring books: This is an oldie but a goodie, for each spectacular page meaning they took the time and stayed in the lines gets a special treat.
6. Graph paper projects: Using 1 inch graph paper I have the older ones make up word searches for them to do together, while my youngest colors on blank paper.
7. Sand Art: A bit messy but very inexpensive and time consuming for them to create cool bottles or jars of sand art that are later given as gifts.
8. Paper mache art: Also a bit messy and also inexpensive but creativeness is endless.
9. Scrapbooking: Our local Dollar Store has a ton of scrapbooking stuff and the kids love to make cool pages about their day or what they want to do.
10. Stamp art: Over the years my children have accumulated a bunch stamps from gifts. We replace the ink stampers and make cards, journals and pages. We also use the stamps for the scrapbooking.

For more childrens craft idea, visit Mom’s Talk Network’s Crafts for Kidlets!

photo credit: Carissa GoodNCrazy