Coming Up This Weekend: Rideau Canal Festival

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED This year the Rideau Canal Festival is celebrating the 180 birthday of the canal. The celebration starts this Friday and the weekend will be fill of events for all ages.

The events take place at two sites along the canal - the Bytown Myseum and Dow's Lake.

At the Bytown Museum Site you can see stone carvers, acrobats visiting from China, dance performances and puppetry. Meanwhile, at the Dow's Lake site there are activities for older kids, including workshops on stop motion animation and robotics.

The celebration wraps up with a celebration of Colonel By Day on August 6 at the Bytown Museum, a free event starting at 11 am. The celebration will feature theatrical performances, crafts, musical performances and demonstrations.

You can find a full schedule for the two sites here and read what one parent thought of last year's festival here.

We have two family passports to give away for the Rideau Canal Festival this weekend. The passport gives a family of four access to festival VIP areas,  free entry into the Bytown Museum and the Canadian Museum of Nature, discounts on specials at participating restaurants and tons of savings on city-wide activities on festival weekend and throughout the year. Leave a comment and you're automatically entered! 

Pinteresting my way through summer vacation

by Lara I'm not always the most creative when it comes to finding activities for the kids.  With them home with me full time this past week I have leaned heavily on Pinterest for indoor activities.

What I love about so many of the pins is that just a photo of an activity idea is often enough for me to run with it (psa: when pinning, remember to pin to the URL to the exact post you're referring too.  Too often I click through to a front page of a site and can't find anything about what I thought I was clicking through to see).

Here a couple of the crafts we tackled this week:

Ours may or may not have turned out as nicely as those photos ;)

This particular pin has me inspired to maybe tackle a bigger project next week:

And in case you didn't know, Kids in the Capital has it's own Pinterest account where we try to share all things kids.  Come on over and join us!

Leave a comment sharing what some of your favourite kid activity pins have been lately!

Messy Science Fun

by Amy In this house we have been suffering from a spate of "I want to do something else" syndrome. Nothing seems to keep the toddler entertained for more than a few minutes at a time, and it doesn't take long before this Mommy runs out of energy to think of new things. We go swimming, we bake together, she takes gymnastics, but her energy is constant so when we're just home I have to keep trying to entertain her.

Today, after going through a few of our normal activities it was "something else, Mommy!" again, so I logged on to Pinterest to see what else we could try. I came upon this on my Crafts board.

Fun! Messy! Science!

So I got out my corn starch and the food colouring and we mixed it all together and keep the kid occupied for a good little while.

The truth is, it looks messy but it actually washes off hands quite easily. I haven't tried to clean the pan yet.

We'll probably be doing this again.

Amy is mom to two year old Maggie and a 6 year old schnauzer named Henry. You can read her blog at amyboughner.ca where she writes about motherhood and anything else that’s on her mind. She also shares a blog with her husband at boughner.ca where they talk together about parenting a daughter.

Flashback: Backyard playstructures

by Lara We want to hear how you have your backyard decked out!  Will you write a post for us about your playstructure? Your swingset? Your climber? How you make your backyard kid friendly and safe?

We invested in the Costco one and we love it:

Here's a bit about it:

- Costs about $1400-1500 with tax included (I forget exactly now) so it's not cheap.  The wood is really nice quality though and the thing is really sturdy.

- It comes COMPLETELY disassembled.  It took two men two entire days to put together and it was a lot of work. My husband says it's not hard to assemble, just follow the instructions and lay out all the pieces by the number on them ahead of time and you'll be ok.  It's just time consuming.

- It's beautiful

-   My kids are 3 and 5 and they are so comfortable on this structure I get nervous.  The 3 year olds are already walking around the outside!

- Under the house portion is a sandbox that gets used a lot.

- It came with a matching picnic table.

-It takes up a lot of room so if you don't have a fairly large yard you will need to measure and make sure it will fit.

It gets a huge amount of use at our house and I totally feel it was worth our money; we'll get years and years of use out of it.

Lara Wellman is mom to 5 year old Kiernan and 3 year old twins Quinn and Juliette. You can read her personal blog at Gliding Through Motherhood, or get tips on how to simplify social media on her business site.

A Toddler paradise - Constance Bay Beach

by Pam Wheeeee - summer is here (has been for a while, it seems, but, you know...officially)!!!

As a mom of toddler twins (one of which isn't even walking yet), I am always on the lookout for great fun options for outdoor play, especially ones that are safe (well, as safe as possible) for them.

Enter an outdoor oasis a mere 15-20 minute drive from our front door in Kanata - Constance Bay. I mean, I KNEW there was a beach there, and I also recalled that it was shallow, but it wasn't until a veteran mommy friend of mine invited us to join them so that we got to experience it.

How much fun did we have? No crying. At all. All morning long right up until after their normal naptime. Sitting and splashing. Walking and splashing. Eating and splashing. Splashing and splashing. With lots of sand everywhere, and water that as far as I could tell was under my knee height. It was fantastic, and there was no need to strap the girls into bulky life jackets. They were happy little clams.o go that it occurred to me...this might be a fabulous place for an unpredictable, non-swimming, fickle toddler...or two.

A couple other notes:

• There is no one in the parking lot at 9:30 am on a Friday (we parked by Point Lounge at 346 Bayview Drive - easy to Google and get to).
• Meeting up with other veteran Mommies means you learn tips and tricks.
• For instance, take one of those portable umbrellas and set it up right in the water - shade for the mini-splash contingent!
• Eat your snack or lunch right in the water - chances are that what you brought your toddler are things that can be eaten by hand, so why struggle with sandy hands, feet, and ultimately food?
• And finally, when leaving, take your messy sandy toddler deeper into the water, undress them in the water, rinse off completely and walk them straight to the car to put on the fresh diaper and clothes. Worked brilliantly. Also meant that it was straight into bed for naptime when we got home.

What fabulous local 'getaways' do you know? What ages are they perfect for? Share!!!

Pam (@paminottawa)/http://paminottawa.wordpress.com/) is mom to twin toddlers Alexandra and Hailey, trying to rid herself of her mommy tummy, and is also a strategic social media communicator with the government on the side.  She is also newly able to change poopy diapers again after 6 months in cast with a broken arm. All things important in perspective.