I realized we skipped June on accident, but all the hours I've spent scrolling Pinterest is finally bearing some fruit and I have a lot of ideas for diy dates that I can't wait to share with you in the coming months!
Our first activity was birthed out of the recent budgeting we have been doing. We have really been trying to cut frivolous expenses, and I have found the two areas where we are most guilty of this are grocery shopping and eating out. We have so many items in our pantry just sitting there, some unopened cans and boxes have moved with a few times. The stuff was probably suitable for donation, but definitely still edible.
Inspired by a friend of mine who has bake-offs with her husband for a fun date activity (shout out to you Barb!), I thought it would be perfect to incorporate a Chopped style baking competition with my husband using only the ingredients in our pantry.
If you have never seen Chopped, it is a cooking game show on the Food Network in which the contestants are given a basket of seemingly random ingredients and a limited pantry to create fantastic dishes for a panel of food experts to judge. We cheated in our version a little bit, because we allowed ourselves to use the internet to look up recipes once we knew what we were making, and we didn't have a time limit, and we helped each other a little bit (one of us more than the other ha!).
I took the easy route and made no bake cookies. In fact the reason we had so many oats is because after Avery was born I was making no bakes all the time, so when I say it was the easy route I mean it truly was because I have made them so many times. Travis was much more creative and ambitious, and I was so impressed that he wanted to make an apple crisp. (I also learned that he really likes apple desserts, which is something I can't believe I didn't know before! Just another benefit to doing these things together!) Unfortunately, due to the poor recipe writing on the blog he pulled his recipe from, some of the crucial ingredients that were on the recipe list were not actually included in the steps and his dessert didn't end up being edible. He was mostly bummed because he really wanted some apple crisp.
Our second activity was a little more random, and mostly just a result of my Pinterest scanning. I came across one pin showing a family game night that included homemade ski ball. My husband absolutely loves ski ball! It seemed like a fairly simple and safe indoor game to put together using whatever we had (bonus: it gave me incentive to put away clean clothes that have been in our three laundry baskets for the last few weeks!).
Also, thanks to our child and all of her wonderful relatives who have gotten her about every toy marketed in this country, we actually had a whole bag full of ball pit balls, which I thought would be perfect for diy ski ball.
The only thing I lacked was a ramp. I probably should have read the blog posts where people had done their own ramps so I could learn from their mistakes and know what would work best for a ramp. Instead, I figured the lid of a Rubbermaid tote with a cardboard box under one side would make a sufficient ramp. It did not. We had great trouble getting the little balls to roll over the slight lip the lid had around the edge.
After several warm-up rounds, we decided not to keep score... or play by any rules.
Even though the game ended up being a bust, we still had fun with it (kitty stacks is another one of our favorite games!).
There was request from him for more game nights and more apple desserts in the future, so we shall see what I can come up with.