School holiday ideas for parents: 5 books chocker block full of ideas or activities you can do as a family

List by Tosca

"A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
- Bill Vaughan

This is true! As a child the best activities mum organised were the ones that cost next to nothing, usually ideas she'd gotten out of books. We forever had those 'Things to do on a rainy day' kind of books around the house. Considering my mum had eight children and seven of them were always underfoot, I don't know how she handled school holidays and stayed sane. I don't ever remember being idle, though. I have memories of mum arranging daily activities to keep us busy which is probably why now, as adults, we try to do the same with the nephews/niece. Every school holiday each of my sisters (and mum until she moved away - wait, was this *why* she moved away?) agrees to take the kids for a day and entertain them. How you choose to spend that time is wholly up to you. I tend to go one of two ways: throw money at it and take the kids to Kelly Tarlton's or the Auckland Zoo and ooh and aahh over creatures and generally run screaming through the grounds (you've probably seen me and didn't even realise it) OR put a bit of thought into it and draw up a day of activities and crafts. The last few years have seen the return of books that advocate retro family fun - the kind of fun we had as kids before technology took over: hopscotch, charades, magic tricks, gift-making, fishing, and so on. For the next few days leading up to the school holidays I'll be recommending books that will give you some great ideas for keeping the kids busy. Today's post is a collection of books that focus on crafts and activities you can do with dad, with mum or as a family. They're also books that I'll be using for my day with the kids. Wish me luck. I may need it.

5 of Harlow's poems that made me want to dog-ear the pages of a library book (although I resisted)

List by Tosca

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."
- W.B. Yeats

I'm an inveterate dog-ear folder of pages. Not because I'm intentionally destructive (although some ardent bibliophiles may argue otherwise). Maybe more because when I connect with a book emotionally I feel as if I have to create some obvious landmark that says, 'Epiphany here!' Once I've finished reading the book in its entirety I tend to go back and re-read the marked pages and try to figure out why I had such a lightbulb moment. Sometimes the reasons aren't always so clear why some lines strike a chord and others don't. I had lots of those moments when reading Michael Harlow's The tram conductor's blue cap. So much so that narrowing down my selection to 5 wasn't so easy. So many passages, if not the entire poem, came to life for me. This is a whimsical post and I make no apologies for my flights of fancy. Here I do little more than share the titles of 5 of Harlow's poems that struck a chord with me although I couldn't begin to tell you why.