Entertaining Your Kids When It’s 118
After the thermometers first hit 115 degrees in the summer every blogger in Phoenix breaks out a list of Things To Do When It’s Really Hot Out. So I thought I’d contribute my thoughts to the blogosphere about potential activities you can do with your kids when it’s so warm out you start to feel like your own brain is cooking inside your skull:
1. Become nocturnal. Only let your kids sleep during the hottest part of the day (9am to 6 or 7pm, depending on the age of the child) and then wake them up and go on about your business like normal. It will take a few weeks for them to adjust, but it will be worth it. It will still be 90 degrees at 3am, but the monkey bars won’t hibachi grill their skin.
2. Take your kids to Super Walmart for the day and tell them it’s an amusement park. You can start in the Wacky-Tacky Clothing Land and play games like, “Find the pants that don’t have an elastic waistband” and “What celebrity tween with access to a sweatshop designed this shirt?” Next head to Electronics Alley where the teenagers can ‘test-out’ video games and the little ones can watch movies. Then it’s onto Crafter’s Paradise where you can play a rowdy round of “Dodge the cranky old lady”, which is kind of like Frogger, but there are more nude colored pantyhose and dentures involved. Last, but definitely not least you can spend a few hours in the Toyventures area and let the kids play with all the toys there until they are bored with them or have broken a piece off so they don’t work anyway. It’s all of the fun and none of the cost of actually buying toys for your kids.
3. At 1pm fill up your biggest bathtub completely with ice. Tell your kids to have a bike race around the block. As soon as they leave, start filling the tub with water from the ‘cold’ tap (which will still come out scalding at first). When they return, 1.8 minutes later with fuschia cheeks, tell them to get undressed and get directly into the bath. The combination of the warm tap water and their body heat will melt the ice almost immediately and it will be a refreshing experience for 3 minutes until the water heats back up to room temperature.
4. Serve all of your meals frozen and pureed. It’s the same principle as is frozen bananas. Just cut up all of your meals and freeze them for a few hours, then put them in the food processor until they are a cold paste-like substance. Meats will end up like cold pate’ sort of foods and anything dairy-based can be like a savory ice cream. You can develop your children’s palette’s for disgusting food while keeping cool.
5. Drop your kids off in the nearby desert (there’s space right next to where we live in NE Mesa if you’re looking for one) with nothing but a video camera for one afternoon. Tell them to keep it rolling and you’ll be back in four hours. Then you can send the video in to that “I Survived…” show and the kids can become famous.
6. Set a slip n slide up in your backyard. Tell your kids to each get out two swimsuits. Soak the suits in water and put them in the freezer. Once they have frozen, take the first set out and have the kids put them on and go outside and slip n slide until the swimsuit melts and then come in and switch them out so one will always be in the freezer. This should help to counteract the molten lava-like temperature of the vinyl.
7. Whenever your kids whine, “It’s too hot out,” tell them, “Don’t be so selfish. There are kids living on the surface of the sun who would be thrilled to live in Arizona in the summer. You are so lucky and you don’t even know it.”