New Blog Offers A Game-A-Day for Kids

The pleasures of playing at home, making up games, and creating challenging puzzles seem to be in the air lately. Families are drifting away from passive entertainment toward more engaging activities for children. And for adults, too. Welcome to todayisfun.com, a blog that is home to bringing simplicity back into the home. Pacific Palisades resident Steve Wein and his editing colleague Paul Plew have created a daily activity blog that offers postings of fun, simple-to-plan activities for children ages 2 to 12. Their todayisfun.com Web site not only supplies an activity a day, but also provides a list of materials needed and the rules of the road. Many of these ideas are a perfect distraction to keep kids happy and occupied, without parents needing to spend money. The two men, both parents, have organized the activities according to categories, such as ‘good for the car,’ ‘good for a group,’ ‘outside activities,’ ‘rainy day fun.’ Fun may include making puppets from empty cereal boxes, tasting foods while blindfolded, asking Google to ‘decode’ the bar codes on all manner of products, or organizing races for kids, who run as different animals’their choice. Todayisfun.com is dedicated to helping parents come up with entertaining, educational and cost-free ways to keep their kids occupied. The ideas are archived on the blog, so if one doesn’t appeal or is too elementary or too sophisticated for the child or children, there are many others to choose. The two men came up with the idea, which launched in the spring of 2008, in an organic, casual way. ‘We both just enjoy being with our kids and playing with our kids,’ Wein says. He and his wife Valentina have two boys, Zack, 6, and Mason, 4. ‘We enjoy their minds and their inventiveness,’ Wein continues, ‘and, because we’re a bit ‘off,’ we thought it would be fun to share these ideas with other parents.’ Wein admits that many good ideas have been passed down, ideas that are just as fun today, but he is also drawn to games that people haven’t heard of before. His own mother set the tone when he was a boy.   ’My mom sort of taught me that if you give a child a simple item without the bells and whistles and flashing lights, the kids will bring their own imagination to the game. She would give me a string of paper clips and say ‘Here you go, talk to me in an hour.”   One of Wein’s favorites these days is the mythical animal game. ‘I say I’m thinking of an animal I saw at the zoo called the schmippopotamus, have you ever heard of it? The kids say, you mean hippopotamus, and I say, no, it’s the animal next to the Smelephant. And so it goes. The kids start to jump in and add their own animals.’ Wein says that big winners with his sons are the more active games, such as the running game as different animals. ‘My kids are more rowdy and physical, so these work well. Paul has a daughter and a son, who are bit older, 8 and 10, so other games work better for them.’ As for a 2-year-old? Wein suggests the game, good for the car, where you stretch out your hands as far as they go and then, clap, clap, clap. Trying on funny hats, or playing dress-up is always fun for little ones. There is also the Moon Catcher for a Day game. The first person who spots the moon is rewarded by being given the title ‘Moon Catcher.’ Wein and Plew, who edit commercials and television shows, make no promises as child development experts. They’re not doctors or therapists. But any one suggestion on the site might be just the right idea that will keep everything from slipping into total chaos.