Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Simple Living

5 Simple (and Free) Ways to Entertain a Young Child

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According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American child will cost his parents $222,360 by the time he turns 17. I’d like to refute that number since so far my husband and I have needed to buy very little for our three-year-old son Ezra. We thrived without many of the must-haves on the infant lists: a bassinet, crib, diaper-changing table, infant car seat, etc. Boxes of beautiful hand-me-down clothes seem to show up the moment we need them. Family members and friends have generously gifted Ezra toys and books, a wagon, a tricycle, bikes, and a scooter. And he mostly just eats the same things we do.

Having kids isn’t so expensive, I like to muse to myself. But then I remember the major costs of having a small child: daycare ($10,740 a year on average for an infant in this area) or lost wages, and health care. Oh right. There’s no denying it: having kids can be costly.[clickToTweet tweet=”Having a child can be expensive, but entertaining one doesn’t have to be. #kids #parenting” quote=”Having a child can be expensive, but entertaining one doesn’t have to be.” theme=”style1″]

But here’s a little secret my son keeps teaching me – entertaining a small child can be simple, free, and fun. We spend most days doing the following free activities, all of which Ezra loves:

  • going on walks
  • riding bikes
  • visiting city parks
  • packing picnics
  • gardening
  • going to events at our local library
  • picking out and reading library books
  • telling stories
  • visiting friends
  • drawing, coloring, or painting
  • playing with homemade play dough
  • listening to music and dancing
  • playing with the neighbors

5 Simple and Free Ways to Entertain a Young Child #parenting

Honestly, he even loves to make beds and sweep. He can spend 20 minutes examining a ladybug and is endlessly interested in the gas caps on cars. It’s not hard to amuse him. Sometimes we go out for lunch or pick up a treat at our neighborhood market, but most days, we don’t buy anything.

On occasion, though, the old routines grow tiresome, and I sense that a more creative approach to entertainment is in order. Of course, a special event, elaborate art project, hike, or out-of-town trip is sure to please. But here are a few far more simple and free (or almost free) ways to entertain a small child that you might not have thought of:

1. Visit a construction site

Ezra is a huge fan of “tractors,” a class of vehicles that includes forklifts, dump trucks, cranes, front loaders, diggers, and all of the other big, loud machines you find at a construction site. He can stand mesmerized by these giant tools and the people using them for more than an hour. And then he talks about it for days afterward.

It only occurred to me recently to seek out construction sites for his entertainment. Fortunately, it’s spring and there are construction projects happening on all over the city. What’s surprised me is how entertained I am by watching humans construct giant buildings. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.  

2. Go to the train station

Ezra loves trains. He builds tracks all over the living room and is quite particular about which train cars can go where. We’re planning to take him on a long train ride this summer, but recently it occurred to me that just visiting the train station when the passenger train comes in might be a big hit. It is. I imagine visiting an airport would be similarly entertaining if you live near one.

3. Ride the bus or light rail

We don’t ride the bus often. In fact, we ride it so little that I didn’t realize how much Ezra would love it until we needed to get across town on a rainy night and decided to opt for public transit instead of bikes. That was several months ago, and Ezra still talks about it. He loves sitting in the entry garden at our library, because across the street is “where the buses live” and he can watch them come and go. This pretty much sums up how easy it is to entertain a three-year-old.

4. Watch a game

It’s almost softball season, which means endless free entertainment opportunities in our neighborhood. There are a couple of games going on most summer nights at a park a few blocks away from our house. This year we’re looking forward to watching one of our friends play there, but in the past, we’ve watched many strangers play softball. With the night lights on, fans cheering in the stands, and kids running around on the grass – it’s fun and free entertainment. And if softball’s not your thing, there are almost always tennis matches, ultimate Frisbee games, and Frisbee golf tournaments going on in that same park. I’d guess a park near you offers similar free entertainment opportunities.

5. Turn a walk into a scavenger hunt

When motivated to get somewhere, I can’t believe how far Ezra can walk. When he’s tired, on the other hand, a few blocks can feel like an ultra-marathon. That’s when we hunt for things. Looking for cats, snails, things that start with the letter A, certain kinds of flowers, purple things, etc. can make a walk far more entertaining and help the blocks pass more quickly. Plus, I’m almost always amazed by the things Ezra notices that I never would.[clickToTweet tweet=”Stumped for ideas for entertaining a preschooler? Try these. #kids #parenting” quote=”Stumped for ideas for entertaining a preschooler? Try these.” theme=”style1″]

If you like this post, check out more of my popular posts about parenting:

I’d love to hear your ideas (especially for entertaining girls, since I’m not as experienced in that area).

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Pruning Season

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We moved into our house a few years ago in mid-February. A couple of weeks later, a neighbor knocked on the door holding clippers, a miniature saw, and a book on caring for roses. “It’s pruning season,” she said, gesturing toward my backyard, which is teeming with rose bushes.

I’d never pruned anything before. I watched as she demonstrated the technique on a few bushes.

“Cut off anything that’s dead or diseased, anything that’s skinnier than a pencil, and anything that’s growing inward,” she said, as she snipped, clipped, and sawed on a bush.

I spent more than a month pruning the roses that spring, examining each plant before making any cuts. Each one felt like a jigsaw puzzle.

Several weeks after her demonstration, my neighbor walked by and saw me hovering over a bush in the front yard. “Don’t worry. You’ll get more confident when you see them grow back this summer.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Where would you cut this one?” I asked tentatively.

Amazingly the roses bloomed that summer. I wandered among them in the evenings, watching the heads close in the fading light,  examining their thorny branches. I already dreaded February’s life-and-death deliberations of which branch would stay and which would shrivel in the yard waste bin.

Then in January, I walked through the city rose garden. The plants, which were gigantic walls of roses in the summer, were pruned down to almost nothing.

A month later, when I returned to the garden with my clipping shears, I had no fear. It took me less than a week to trim all of the bushes, and they were significantly more pruned this time.

Sure enough, by mid-June, my backyard was full of gigantic blooming bushes.

At first pruning felt counter-intuitive to me. I was sure I would hurt or kill the plants by cutting them back so far. But as I return to the garden this year, the process feels more intuitive, and even like an apt metaphor for life.

Sometimes you have to be fearless about cutting out what you don’t need to make space for more things to grow.

[This is an updated version of “Learning to Prune”, originally posted March 2, 2010. It’s pruning season once again, and I’ve found myself thinking of that post. We’ve had some spring-like weather around here, which feels just perfect for pruning – not just the roses, but the house, the closets, the cupboards… It may be a busy week.]

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10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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Simple-Living Boot Camp

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We’re all familiar with the learning curve – that slow, hiccuping start we get off to when we tackle a new task. The period where we suck at something, which is the necessary preamble to the period where we kick ass at something.

I’ve watched my two-year-old son wobble, fall, and falter hundreds of times already. So I’m sure I’ve been through the learning curve more than a million.

But, for some reason, I didn’t expect a learning curve when it came to simplifying our lives

About a year and a half ago, my husband and I both worked outside the home. We had opposite work schedules, so we never saw each other. We were both working constantly, either at our jobs, or at home caring for our infant son and trying to tame mountains of laundry, dishes, and bills.

By the time our son was one, we were crazy about him. But we were exhausted and miserable about our lifestyles. We knew we had to make a change.

We decided the answer was simple – simple living that is. We would choose to live on less, allowing me to quit my job and be with our son, as well as focusing on my dream job of freelance writing. We’d make bread. We’d garden and compost. We’d ditch processed foods and restaurants and cook everything from scratch. We’d keep backyard hens. We’d make stuff ourselves and heat our house with wood. We’d hang our clothes on the line. We’d ride our bikes and walk more and drive less.

It’s not as though we lived extravagantly before. My husband and I have both always lived fairly simply. I was raised by thrifty freelance-writer parents. I’ve ridden my bike and walked most places for my entire life. I’ve never been into diamonds or spending weekends at the mall. Shopping has always been low on my list of favorite pastimes. And I’ve long been a fan of the voluntary simplicity movement.

So I assumed we’d love our simpler lifestyle. I imagined it would be relatively easy to pare down.

It wasn’t easy.

Recently, a few things made me realize how difficult it was.

  • We went out with friends to a restaurant we used to frequent. (We used to eat out a lot.) The food didn’t taste good. Then the same thing happened at another restaurant. That’s when I realized what had really happened. The food we make at home now tastes really good. We learned how to cook.
  • I started looking forward to heading outside on cool mornings to swing the axe around and realized that I’ve become a master wood-splitter.
  • I have not used a recipe to make bread in eight months.
  • My friend asked me if I missed our car, and I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about at first. Miss our car? Oh, that’s right, we’re not driving our car. I hardly even think about our car, and I usually don’t miss it, at least 95 percent of the time.

The relative ease of cooking from scratch, making bread, chopping wood, and living sans automobile today made me realize that these and so many of our other lifestyle changes were once pretty difficult.

The first few times I made bread felt like conducting a chemistry experiment. And I’m glad you’ll never see my first attempts at chopping wood or taste some of our not-so-delicious attempts at main courses. When my husband first started riding his bike to work, he came home exhausted most days. And I think he probably said, “The simple life isn’t so simple.” at least 50 times last year.

It feels like we’ve been through simple-living boot camp.

We still have a lot to learn. But we’ve gotten physically stronger and more resilient and we’ve honed dozens of skills that serve us well everyday, make us feel better about our environmental impact, and which I hope will help us be more financially secure in the future. As my friend, who’s been on her own journey toward a simpler, greener, thriftier life, quipped the other day, “If I’d lived like this for the last ten years, I’d have $50,000 in the bank right now.”

So if you’re thinking about paring down, trying to save more money, learning to cook or meal-plan, giving up TV, ditching plastic, switching to green cleaners, making your own personal care items, or embarking on some other lifestyle change, I am here to tell you that it may not be easy at first. You will probably have to learn each new skill, just as you’ve learned everything else in your life – slowly and day-by-day.

But you will kick ass at it before you know it.

What new skills have you learned this year? What’s the most difficult lifestyle change you’ve made? What’s the most rewarding?

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Confessions From the Car-Free Life

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“Maybe we should get the car fixed,” I mutter to my husband as icy rain pelts my face

It’s a pitch-black, moonless evening. It feels more like midnight than 5:30. We’re on our way to a birthday dinner for my husband’s colleague, pedaling onto a bike bridge that crosses a busy street. Below us cars zooms past, a snake of yellow headlights.

“You’re telling me,” my husband says. One of his bike spokes broke earlier in the day, and his back wheel lets out a shrill whine every time he pedals.

Our two-year-old son seems oblivious to our harrowing adventure. “We’re going to the pizza shop,” he sings in his trailer. “The pizza shop, the pizza shop.”

My family is in the midst of an experiment in car-free living. Our Isuzu Rodeo is still parked in front of our house, but we haven’t driven it for three months. It needs major repairs, and we can’t decide whether to invest money in it. Even our mechanic, who stands to gain mightily from us continuing to drive this car, looked hesitant when he told us about the repairs. “When things start going on these…” he said, trailing off and shaking his head. But we also don’t want to take out a loan to buy a newer car right now.

So we’re weighing the pros and cons of car ownership, and it occurred to us that we needed more information to aid our decision-making. After all, we didn’t really know what it was like to live without a car. So we decided to try something I’ve long been fascinated by – car-free living.

I’m not fond of driving. I love to walk and ride my bike. I’d usually prefer to be in tune with the weather, the seasons, my neighbors, and my city, rather than experiencing them from behind a windshield.

Moreover, I don’t like what car-dependence has done to our culture. I don’t like gulping down smog. I hate the constant roar of traffic in our backyard. I hate sitting in gridlock. I don’t care for behemoth box stores with sprawling parking lots. I’m saddened when I think about oil wars, spiraling obesity rates, growing social isolation, and thousands of people dying in unnecessary accidents every year.

But this night, as we lock our bikes to a rack and trudge toward the pizza shop, I want a car.

At the restaurant, our party is sitting at a long table in the corner. We cross the room. My husband’s rubber rain pants squeak with every step.

Everyone stands up to say hello. Most of them are accountants. They’re dressed up. I sit down across from a financial planner, who’s wearing a white button-down shirt and ironed slacks, and stow my helmet under the table. I smile and try to pretend like riding a bike to a dinner date on a freezing cold, drizzly night is a perfectly normal thing to do. But, at the moment, I’m sure I look like my grumpy tabby cat when he comes in from the rain.

Our car-free experiment has actually been much easier than I imagined it would be. My husband is having a great time riding to work with a coworker. We figured out how to pick up chicken feed with our bike trailer. Most of the time we don’t even think about the car. And that’s the thing about car-free living, it’s not that hard once you get used to it – if you don’t let yourself think about how effortless it used to be to zip to the store or restaurant in a V6.

We munch on slices of pizza, and I make small talk with the financial planner. During lulls in the conversation, I dream about cars. Leather interiors. Seat warmers. Air conditioning. Cruise control.

After dinner, we bundle up and brace ourselves to head back out into the freezing rain. But it’s not raining anymore. And after only a few minutes on my bike, the heaviness of my pizza dinner lifts. We glide down the bike path, our lights glittering in the darkness, and talk about the night.

As we pedal onto the bike bridge and soar down the other side, I realize that if we had a car, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be flying through the night. I wouldn’t feel so light, so healthy, so free.

“Do you really want to fix our car?” I ask my husband.

“Well, it can’t get much harder than tonight, right?”

I wonder if someday soon, we’ll laugh at that question. But for now, our experiment continues.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Ever wanted to ditch your car? Read Confessions from the Car-free Life. #carfree #biking #bikes” quote=”Ever wanted to ditch your car? Read Confessions from the Car-free Life. ” theme=”style1″]

If you liked this post, read more of my popular posts about car-free living:

Do you live, or have you ever lived, car-free or car-lite? I’d love to hear about it.

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Resourcefulness is Back in Style

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Resourcefulness – (n.) The ability to come up with clever ways to solve a problem.

The bad economy hasn’t been easy for my family, or for many of my friends and neighbors. But these lean times are forcing many of us to hone an incredibly useful skill: resourcefulness.

In the last few years, my husband and I have learned to build raised bed gardens, grow vegetables, raise chickens, make bread, put up a fence, prepare delicious meals from inexpensive ingredients, fix broken faucets, remedy a variety of plumbing problems, treat a handful of minor human and feline ailments, grow and harvest herbs, and on and on. We are, by the day, becoming more resourceful people.

We learned one thing early in our roles as homeowners, cat and chicken-tenders, and parents to a little person: things will go wrong. And when things go wrong, it’s tempting to (a) feel overwhelmed (and often sorry for ourselves) and (b) tote out the Yellow Pages to look for someone to call to make things better. The problem with this approach is that it’s very expensive.

So my husband and I are learning to step back when things go wrong and ask ourselves, “How can we fix this?” This simple tactic has saved us many hundreds of dollars – in the last month alone.

But it’s done so much more than that. Tapping into our ingenuity, instead of calling someone to fix things, takes away fear. When we grow confident in our ability to solve problems – or to network with our friends and neighbors to solve problems –we stop being scared of the things that may go wrong. We start trusting that we’ll be creative and clever when we need to be, and that we can find solutions to even seemingly insurmountable problems.

Of course, we can learn much about honing our inner resourcefulness from our grandparents’ generation. They (and many generations of people before them) had to master the skill. Take these stories from Ohio’s Great Depression Story Project:

We grew all our own vegetables. We had our own orchard. We had our own cows, had milk, made our own butter, did a lot of canning. My mother at one time had over 800 jars in the basement of jams, jellies, meat, fruits, vegetables, all these different things…
– Dean Bailey, age 82

Grandma made her own bread and baked it in an open hearth oven that my Grandfather had built in their backyard. I have never tasted anything as good as that since. If there were any loaves left over by her next baking day, Grandma would make an Italian dish called ‘minestra’ – made with the cut up left over bread, beans, ham hocks and dandelion greens. This was a poor man’s meal, but very nourishing. Mom and Grandma would walk to lnterlake field to pick the dandelions used in this dish.
– Mary Rose DeMaria, age 83

For a refrigerator we used an empty gallon can with a rope tied to it, which we lowered down a dug well to sit on the top of the water. That would cool a pound of bologna… For a while before we had electricity, we heated the irons that we used to do the ironing on the cook stove. We bathed in a large wash tub that was also used to wash our laundry…
– Lester Baiman, age 82

We had no cellar to store our canned food in and my dad would make a place in the garden where he would pile up straw or hay. He would put vegetables in a pile then he would put more hay or straw on them. Then, he would put burlap sacks and old coats on top of that. He would cover it all with some soil and in the winter he could dig in it and get vegetables to eat and they kept very well.
– Charles Warrick, age 81

We raised chickens (lots of chicken and eggs were on the menu), canned our garden vegetables along with apples, pears, grapes, cherry and plums. Dandelions were our first spring greens and we welcomed them after the long winter. Mom made many casseroles, pancakes, cookies, fried donuts and fritters. Sometimes we had ice for the ice box, but we often cooled many foods in a special place in the basement.
– Marian Seilheimer, age 89

There were no disposable diapers, no paper towels and no paid babysitters. Everything was used and re-used and repaired. Nothing was thrown away. You saved buttons, nails and screws in a Prince Albert tobacco can, 1# size. It was a great day when the feed company started to put feed in pretty, printed sacks. We’d tell the men to get 4 sacks alike. That would make a dress, curtains, shirts, tablecloths, etc.”
– Margaret Smith, age 94

We lived in a couple rooms at a private residence and I remember the single light bulb hanging in the combination living room/bedroom. Mother cooked on a hot plate and washed dishes in the bathroom, which we shared. No refrigerator, only a window box to use in the winter. We never had a thought in our mind that maybe we weren’t rich. Mom and Dad always had a job and everybody laughed all the time.
– Vane S. Scott, Jr., age 85

(If you enjoyed these stories, you can read many more here.)

Are you becoming more resourceful because of the bad economy? I’d love to hear about it.