Serendipity Mommy

For happy, healthy, thriving moms

5 Themes for Your Kids Birthday Party

by

So you’re planning your kids birthday party. Happy birthday and good luck. These things can be a whole lot of work. To make your job easier we highly recommend choosing a fun theme. Not only does this help you tailor the party to your kid’s personality but it also helps make all the little choices you’re going to make easier. If you want to up the ante and make your kid’s birthday more special for him and his friends, give them a loot bag they’ll never forget. Curate candies, toys, and little tokens to add in a loot bag. If you opt to make homemade treats, you can place the sweets in food-safe flexible packaging so they can stay fresh and lengthen their shelf life.  What will the cake be? What about entertainment? Should you hire a jumping castle? There are all kinds of questions to ask and when you have a theme these choices get that much easier.

To that end, we’ve put together 5 great and general themes to help you get started.

  1. Princesses– If you have a little girl, you’ll know exactly what a princess party theme means. Lots of colour, music and Disney references. Luckily there isn’t too much in terms of licencing to worry about, lots of places have themed items these days, this company even hires princess-themed jumping castles (among many other themes). Just remember if you hire a pony, someone is going to have to clean up after it.
  2. Super Heros– There are more superhero-themed things out there than you can shake a cape at. If your child loves to dress up and run around saving the world this is a great theme. Once your child and all their mates are running around dressed up as their favourite heroes remember to take some photos. In fact, setting up some photo station with props can be fun for the kids and their parents.
  3. Pirates– It’s funny how time changes things, once a violent scourge of the high seas now reduced to delightful characters fit for a child’s birthday. The romantic old notions of adventure on a tall sailing ship and hunting for buried treasure make for great fun and games as well as oh so many fun voices to do. Probably the easiest theme to make a goody bag out of, chocolate gold coins and eyepatches all around.
  4. Sci-Fi– All things futuristic and aliens themed can be the way to go here. From Star Wars to NASA a sci-fi themed kids party offers all sorts of things to explore. For decorations think about using lots of different flashing lights Since so many kids these days love and understand technology a sci-fi theme is perfect for your little gadget enthusiast.
  5. Cars, Train and Anything That Moves– If you’ve got a child already asking when they can get their driver’s licence then this theme might be right for you. There are tons of popular examples of popular brands for smaller kids, things like Thomas the Tank Engine or Pixar’s Cars movies. For older kids, a trip to the go-cart track might be the best way to do it.

No matter what theme you pick for your kids next birthday party with a little planning and patience you can make it a success. Remember, it’s not so much about the theme that you pick but what you do with that theme. Get going and plan a theme with kids party hire and have a blast!

A Junior Equestrian: 3 Ways to Get Your Kids Interested in Horseback Riding Lessons

by

Around 7 million Americans go horseback riding every year.

Horseback riding has many advantages for kids from boosting self-confidence to being a fantastic form of exercise.

If you’re unsure how encourage horseback riding lessons for kids, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to know.

Benefits of Horseback Riding

There are many advantages of horseback riding for children. Horseback riding introduces children to many areas of life like dealing with fear. They also have these benefits, for example:

Improves Health and Fitness

Horseback riding is brilliant exercise as it keeps children activewhile socializing with their friends.

Riding a horse requires coordination, strength and stamina, crucial for children’s development.

Boosts Confidence 

Caring for a horse and horseback riding teaches children new skills as they learn how to care for, groom, and muck horses out. This will improve their confidence around large animals and help form a strong bond with their new friend.

Horseback riding also teaches children responsibility and to put others before themselves. Children will also develop better social skills once they’re part of the riding community which is a crucial life-long lesson.

How to Get Your Child Interested 

There are many ways to get your child interested in horseback riding. And once they have a taste, they can tell whether it’s a long-term passion. Here’s how to do it, for example:

  1. Book Lessons

The best way to encourage horseback riding for kids is by searching online or asking around for lesson barns or instructors around your area.

Before booking any lessons, visit the stables to ensure they’re in good condition. There should be a fenced riding arena for children’s horseback riding lessons and horses suitable for beginners.

There must be high-quality horseback riding gear for kids and the horses must appear healthy. Watch lessons to see the instructor’s style, whether they emphasize safety, and clearly explain instructions.

Then, book a trial lesson so your little one meets the horses and if they enjoy it.

  1. Try Horseback Riding On Vacation

Go horseback riding as a family when you’re on vacation. Your child will learn the basics about horseback riding and it’s a non-committal way for your child to try it. Plus, children can try horseback riding on various terrain like on the beach.

  1. Visit a “Schooling Show” Day

Encourage horseback riding for children by visiting a schooling show or play day where children enter the competition on school horses.

Beginners will discover horseback riding gear for children and can enter a walking or trot class so they get a feel for horseback riding.

That’s How to Inspire Horseback Riding Lessons For Kids

Now you know how to get horseback riding lessons for kids.

Lessons let your child meet the instructor, learn more about the stables, and try horseback riding. Book a trial so your little one can decide whether they want to continue horseback riding.

Did you find this article helpful? If so, check out our articles on everything from Fashion to Beauty.

Birthdays in Quarantine: 12 Best Ideas on Celebrations for Kids

by

Does your child have a birthday coming up? Are you worried about what to do to make up for missing your child’s usual birthday party?

Birthdays in quarantine can be difficult for adults, let alone for children! But there are still things you can do to make the day special for your child. Let’s go through the 12 best ideas for your child’s birthday celebration in quarantine.

1. Make It a Virtual Party

If your kid is old enough, moving their birthday party to the virtual sphere might be a viable idea. Group conferencing services like Zoom and Skype are a really great way to keep in touch with your family and friends during this time, and they’re just as useful to make a birthday celebration a little more lively!

You’ll just want to make sure you stagger the arrivals to keep the group small and stop the call from being too overwhelming. And, it’ll give some wiggle room for technical difficulties and other such problems.

2. Throw a Parade

If you live in a suburban or rural area and most of your children’s friend’s families have cars, why not throw your kid a drive-by birthday party parade?

You’ll all be able to stay properly socially distanced, and it’ll help your child feel appreciated and love during this difficult time. Your children’s friends can wave signs, play with noisemakers, and so much more — the possibilities are endless!

Plus, the process of planning a birthday parade for your child will entertain your children’s friends as well, and help engage them in the birthday planning process. Their parents will surely thank you for lifting the mood as well!

3. Bake a Lot of Cake

Even if you’re not big on sweets for your children, a birthday in quarantine is the perfect occasion to break some rules and sample plenty of delicious new cake recipes. Might as well splurge!

Birthdays are a once a year celebration, and it’s really hard to have one isolated from other people, so it’s really important to do what you can to make it special. If that’s sugar, so be it!

You can also make the cake-baking a group activity, so your child can have fun and feel included in the process.

Here are a few different types of cake you may want to try baking for your child’s quarantine birthday:

  • Cheesecake
  • Cookies and Cream Cake (double points for Oreo cookie crust)
  • Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting
  • Chocolate sheet cake
  • Rice Krispie square marshmallow cake
  • Red velvet layer cake
  • Homemade confetti cake
  • Chocolate vanilla cake
  • Candy turtle cupcakes
  • Ice cream cake

The above are just some of the cake options out there for you to try. Hey, it doesn’t have to even be cake! You can try cookies, donuts, and more. The world is your oyster!

4. Take It Outside

If you have a backyard or safe access to a park, celebrating outside can be a really good way to help your kids have fun during a quarantine birthday party.

You can set up a campout, roast marshmallows on a bonfire, go hiking, and so much more. The possibilities are endless when you take your child’s quarantine birthday party to the great outdoors.

Just make sure to pay attention to weather conditions, and be very careful about observing proper safety and social distancing measures if you plan to be in a place that other people have access too. After all, birthdays are important, but safety is really the most important thing.

5. Head Online

If you’re looking for something more creative than a Zoom call, why not head to the video game landscape for your child’s party!

Many video games, like Animal Crossing, are both safe for kids and allow for people to visit with each other within the game. This is a great option for engaging your kids with their friends in a creative and collaborative environment. Plus, it’ll take up a lot of time, if you have other surprises in store for your kid’s big day.

6. Go Heavy on Presents

Presents always help, right? Ordering your child the birthday gift of their dreams might help cushion the blow of COVID-19. Find out what will truly make your child happy this year, and (if you can afford it) buy it! When thinking about what to get your kid for their quarantine birthday, make sure it’s something they can use given the current lockdown measures like a bike or a new video game console.

7. Plan a Theme Day

Making a themed party based on your kid’s interests may help them enjoy their quarantine birthday more than they would otherwise! For example, if your child is a big fan of princesses, plan a day filled with tiaras, big poofy dresses, and Disney movies! For more theme ideas, check out the following:

  • Mermaids, fairies, and other magical and mythical creatures
  • Toy Story, The Incredibles, Cars, Brave, and the rest of the Pixar movies
  • Witches, gargoyles, and anything spooky and scary
  • Star Trek, Star Wars, and the rest of the great beyond
  • Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and the rest of the classic Disney gang
  • Sesame Street and The Muppets
  • Hockey, Soccer, Tennis, and other sports games

These are just a few theme ideas you could try. Ask your child what theme interests them, so you make sure you know what they want out of their special day!

8. Rent Plenty of Movies

Is your child a big fan of the screens? Try renting a special movie (or several) for their special day. There are even options for online streaming, so your child’s friends will be able to watch the same movies at the same time!

With all of the different streaming services out there, there is no shortage of funny, entertaining, and appropriate kid’s movies so you can do a great movie marathon for your child’s birthday party in quarantine.

9. Get Crafty

Having plenty of arts and crafts on hand may help make your child’s quarantine birthday more enjoyable. Let’s go through some crafts that your children may want to try out for their quarantine birthday:

  • DIY stocking piglets
  • Tissue paper box guitars and banjos
  • Slime and goo to play with
  • Tie-dye clothing and art projects
  • Bubbles and magic wands
  • Make-your-own-recycled-paper or flipbooks

As long as you have different supplies and materials, you’ll be able to do tons of different crafts to cheer your child up on their quarantine birthday. Just be sure to stock up ahead of the big day!

10. Make a Montage

If you have a lot of friends and family who may not be able to jump on a Zoom or Skype call, why not make a video montage in celebration of your child’s birthday? Have your family and friends send in video clips wishing them a happy birthday. Your child will know how much they’re loved and appreciated by your friends and family, and it’ll be a memento they can cherish for the rest of their lives, even once we’re no longer confined to our homes.

11. Make a Blanket Fort

Everyone loves a blanket fort, right? So why not make a blanket fort for your child’s birthday? You already have the necessary ingredients on hand, and it’ll be tons of fun for the whole family. Make sure you have enough couch cushions, pillows, comforters, and the like to do it justice!

Once you have the fort built, the possibilities are endless. You can have a competition to make the best fort, have a blanket versus pillow fort war in teams, or stick to more chill activities like movie watching or board games. Making a blanket fort for your child’s quarantine birthday really is a great idea with so many possible activities involved.

12. Go Scavenging

A scavenger hunt could be a great way to celebrate a birthday in quarantine. Plus, it’ll take up a lot of your day, and it isn’t terribly difficult to set up!

You can even find resources online to help you set up your scavenger hunt quickly, easily, and without wasting a ton of money. You should definitely look into setting up a scavenger hunt for your child’s quarantine birthday party.

Making Birthdays in Quarantine Special for Your Family

It’s not as hard as you think to celebrate birthdays in quarantine for your kids. As long as you’re creative and do your best, your kid will have just as good a birthday as they would have before lockdown!

Are you interested in reading more about other, related topics? Check out some of our other blogs.

Perks and Drawback of Powerful Parenting

by

Parenting involves guidance to the social, emotional, physical, and behavioral development of a child. Powerful parenting emphasizes the highly-effective strategies of parenting in order to get excellence in behavior management of the child. Holding a newborn may fascinate the parents initially, but it involves a long series of responsibilities and challenges of the developmental period from infancy to adulthood. Therefore, powerful parenting has a long list of pros and cons that affect a child’s behavior either positively or negatively. Here, we will provide you with narrative writing of some very common perks and drawbacks of some powerful parenting:

Authoritative Parenting

One of the parenting styles of powerful parenting is “Authoritative style”. Such parenting somehow manages to develop the balance between too lenient and too strict.

Perks

Children raised under authoritative style are confident, empowered and their emotional understanding is encouraged. This powerful parenting style promotes respect, independence, and flexibility among children.

Drawbacks

The strict rules and regulations in authoritative parenting tend to make children isolated. Such strict commanding parents unintentionally devoid the child of their happiness and joy. Such parenting not only throws a child into the pit of loneliness but it also has the tendency to develop rebelliousness in children.

Too much-involved parenting

This is another type of powerful parenting where parents get too much involved in child’s life whether it is related to his emotional, social, or even academic problems. Such type of parenting loads a child with a number of positive and negative aspects.

Perks

Studies have shown that kids with parents’ involvement in school-based activities show better grades as compared to those raised under uninvolved parenting. Along with better grades, there is remarkable progress in attendance, social behavior, and functioning of the child.

Drawbacks

Getting too much involved in the child’s academic procedures, we see most of the time the teachers are not comfortable with such an attitude. Teachers only focus to satisfy such parents instead of truly focusing on solving their child’s real issues. Moreover, such children are too much distracted by the presence of their parents; causing a lack of focus or behavior problems.

Authoritarian Parenting

Authoritarian parenting is a powerful parenting in which all rules and regulations are set by parents only without the consent of their children. In this parenting, only the parents decide their child timetable, interests, subjects to choose, setting a room, and even what clothes to wear. The children are never told why they are raised with such strict rules. Such dominating and commanding parents create a lot of positive and negative behaviors in their children.

Perks

Such children tend to follow rules all their lives and pass this legacy to their children as well. They are goal-oriented as they are taught to plan their goal from the very start of their school.

Drawbacks

The children raised under powerful parenting of authoritarian parents are not free thinkers. Ever since the child regained his conscious, they are given strict instructions from their parents, to spend their lives accordingly. They are strictly forbidden not budge an inch from such setup. Such an imposed lifestyle tends to develop lower self-esteem and a deep-rooted animosity against their parents and society. They are deeply pressured by being not decisive in their personality.

Too much friendly parenting

This powerful parenting has been appreciated widely due to its positive effects on the child’s personality. In the past, we see that there was a very serious and unfriendly relationship between parents and children. Those children used to hide everything from their parents leading to disastrous results as the cost of child sexual abuse. Today, when technology has not hidden anything from children, therefore being a friendly and cordial relationship between a child and the parents is quite inevitable. Such a relationship has the following perks and drawbacks in a child’s life:

Perks

The child enjoys the essence of life with strong confidence, positivity, free-minded. They can easily live independently. They are good at making decisions. As their friendly parents had been very good listeners, trustworthy, therefore their children do not hesitate to share any secrets with them.

Drawbacks

Though being friendly is escorted with a number of positive aspects but it has few drawbacks along. A child gets over-confident about his personality. He is not taught to listen to others thus this trait leads others to get irritated by him. People avoid making friends with him. Another drawback is that he gets involved in the superiority complex which is the same devastating as being over-confident.

To conclude, we can say that such powerful parenting appears to be very satisfactory for the parents but it brings your child under the quest of everlasting personality disorder. Thus, there needs to be a balanced relationship between the child and his parents to obtain the future goals of your child.

Let Her Choose Her Clothes: How to Help Your Daughter Develop Her Own Sense of Style

by

What your daughter wears doesn’t have to cause a fight day after day. There are strategies that you can take as a parent to let her choose her clothes within some parameters that you set. You’ll want to let her develop her own style, within reason.

Instead of letting what your children are wearing become a constant point of contention, use these tips to make sure that your daughter (and your son, if that’s an issue too!) can express herself through her style without making you crazy.

Don’t Make a Big Deal About Her Clothes 

The bigger the deal you make, the more your child will probably want to go against your wishes. If your children are wearing mismatched clothes, as much as it might kill you, bite your tongue and let it go.

Instead of fighting about what to wear to school today, let your children pick their clothes. Provide reasonable choices and let them put an outfit together. Let them show their personality through their fashion choices.

Don’t Go Overboard with Rules 

Putting too many restrictions on your daughter will make it less likely that she will follow them. Be reasonable and set some general parameters, but don’t go crazy. More rules will likely make her want to rebel against them or resent you.

Don’t Expect Your Teen to Dress Like You 

If you’re constantly fighting with your teen about her clothes, you need to take a step back and remember when you were her age. If you expect that she will emulate your style or want to shop at the same stores, you will likely be disappointed.

Juniors departments and stores exist for a reason. Don’t expect someone half your age to dress like you.

Do Give Options

Kids want to exert some independence. Most everything about their life is dictated by parents, including bedtimes, what’s for dinner, and what they’re allowed to do. Choosing clothes is one way they can show their style and make their own choices.

Give your child options when getting dressed. Present them with two or three shirt and bottom options and let them pick. You can also buy coordinated tops and bottoms that they can easily mix and match without your help.

Do Set Some Parameters

If your daughter loves to wear sweatpants or loungewear to school, but you insist that she needs to wear jeans or more structured pants, consider letting her wear comfortable clothes one day a week.

If you want her to dress up for certain occasions, like church on Sunday, give her free reign the rest of the week. If she has the ability to pick her own clothes most days, it will be easier to get her to follow your rules to dress up on Sunday without a huge fight.

Do Pick Your Battles 

Girls clothes don’t have to be all pink or cutesy. Bright primary colors, classic styles, and timeless looks that both you and your daughter will like are out there. Find these clothes, buy them for her (with her input), and let her dress herself.

There are far more important lessons to teach your daughter than constantly harping on her clothing. Pick your battles and avoid this one.

Take a Step Back and Let Her Choose Her Clothes 

It will be hard, but let her choose her clothes. Give your daughter some autonomy to make her own choices and develop her own style.

If you found this article useful, take a look around at some of our other articles before you go.

get children’s educational toys from dhgate.com

Recent Posts

Calling All Moms!

Welcome to Serendipitymommy.com! The woman and parenting resource brought to you by a mom, for moms. I also write articles about travel, business, finance and many more subjects to take your super-momness to the next level!