My youngest is currently obsessed with Spider-Man.

And not just Peter Parker Spider-Man. He loves Miles. He loves Gwen. He loves the older cartoons, Spidey and His Amazing Friends, and every live-action version we decide is appropriate for a four-year-old, which is obviously a very edited selection.

Basically, if the character wears a mask and shoots webs, he is interested.

We are not a completely screen-free family. Sometimes Spidey saves the city, and sometimes Spidey gives me enough time to make dinner without someone hanging from the furniture. Both are valuable public services.

But I have been trying to bring more board games into the house so we have easy activities that do not automatically involve turning on a television or tablet.

Our oldest is reaching the age where he can understand more traditional games, but our youngest is still a little too young for regular Yahtzee. He can roll the dice. He can enthusiastically throw the dice across the room. He can announce that he won before anyone has explained the rules. The actual scoring portion is where things begin to fall apart.

Then I found Spidey and His Amazing Friends Yahtzee Jr., which combines something he already loves with a game simple enough for him to actually play. Instead of matching numbers, players roll dice featuring Spidey characters and match them to the pictures on the scoreboard. Easy enough for him to understand and simple enough for me to explain and not care if we play wrong the three times.

He rolls the dice, finds the matching characters and places his scoring tokens on the board. The character pictures include favorites such as Spidey, Miles Morales and Ghost-Spider, so he is immediately invested in what he rolls. 

He needs a little help, especially when we are learning a new rule, but I am not essentially playing the entire game for him while he wanders away to find a snack. I have learned that telling a four-year-old to stop watching Spider-Man is much easier when the alternative also contains Spider-Man.

We can bring it out after dinner, on a rainy afternoon or during that strange stretch of time when it is too early for bed but everyone has already run out of good decisions. It is also helping him practice taking turns and accepting that other people occasionally win.

We are still working on that second part.

Would I Recommend Spidey Yahtzee Jr.?

For a preschooler who already loves the Spider-Verse, absolutely.

The rounds are manageable, the rules are simple and the character matching keeps his attention. It feels like a real family game rather than something made only to occupy a toddler for three minutes.

Most importantly, he asks to play it.

And for at least a little while, nobody is asking me to find a specific episode where Rhino smashes through a wall. That alone feels like a win.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

I started making art again this spring because my son came home from kindergarten with artwork that genuinely surprised me.

Not because kindergarten artwork is usually bad. Although, let’s be honest, sometimes you do have to smile, nod and wait for the young artist to explain why the purple circle is actually a fire truck. Hint: it was the truck’s tires.

But his drawings were really good. He noticed details. He made interesting choices. He clearly loved doing it. And he was proud to show mommy.

Apparently, I am the mom who did not realize her own child was artistic until school pulled it out of him.

The good news is that I know now and drawing has become something we can do together.

Finding Time to Make Art as a Busy Mom

With two boys under six, I don’t have long, peaceful afternoons to devote to art. Most of my quiet moments happen at night, after bedtime, when the house is finally still and nobody needs a snack.

Sometimes I have five minutes. Sometimes I manage half an hour. Occasionally, bedtime goes suspiciously well and I get enough time to finish an entire piece all at once.

I’ve stopped waiting for the perfect block of uninterrupted creative time because it does not appear to be coming. Instead, I leave my supplies where I can reach them easily and work whenever I find a small opening. Even a few minutes spent adding color or working out one stubborn section helps my brain settle down after a full day.

The Affordable Water-Soluble Pastels I Use

I usually call them oil pastels because that is the easiest way to explain what I’m doing, but the supplies I use most are technically water-soluble pastels.

My everyday set is this affordable set of iCrayon water-soluble pastels. They can be used dry or blended with water, which gives me plenty of room to experiment without needing a complicated setup. They’re actually very smooth to use and layer pretty well.

The set also comes with a brush, palette and sharpener, so it is easy to pull everything out and start working without searching the house for six additional supplies. Although nowadays, I don’t use the watercolor brush or the palette really.

Most importantly, they are inexpensive.

That matters because my son likes to create beside me, and I want him to feel free to try my art supplies without me hovering over him. He can blend colors, press too hard, use half a stick making one very enthusiastic patch of blue and generally experiment without me calculating the cost of every mark.

Adding Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Pastels

I also use Caran d’Ache Neocolor II water-soluble pastels alongside the more affordable set. You can go to Blick and order singles, but until you know you like them, I liked getting a starter set.

The Neocolor II pastels give me additional colors and behave a little differently when I layer them. They sort of work as my finishing tools, help me blend out sections much better than the iCrayons.

This is very much a learning-as-I-go situation.

I still cannot draw people particularly well. Faces are especially dangerous territory. But my blueberries are coming out pretty good, and sometimes you have to recognize your strengths.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Summer break is wonderful. It is also approximately 400 days long when you have two boys under six.

Our oldest just finished kindergarten and will be heading into first grade this fall. He is amazing with numbers. Give him a math problem and he is ready to go. Reading and word recognition, however, are still things we’re working on and I didn’t want everything he learned this year to quietly disappear somewhere between popsicles and sprinkler days.

I also didn’t want to spend the summer fighting with him over worksheets, because even though I enjoyed being a student as a kid, worksheets just make everything feel like a chore.

Enter the Summer Brain Quest: Between Grades K & 1 workbook.

I used Brain Quest books when I was a kid, which feels both nostalgic and like a personal attack on how quickly time is moving. They still have the same colorful, playful feeling I remember, and the activities cover a mix of reading, writing, phonics, counting and other skills he worked on during kindergarten.

The book is divided into manageable sections, so instead of vaguely telling him he needs to “do some schoolwork,” we can give him one clear goal: finish a chapter. Not all at once, of course.

That feels attainable. There is a beginning, an end and no stack of worksheets silently judging either of us from the kitchen counter. Plus we get to add stickers to the map in the back of the book to see how far we’ve gotten.

We’ve also connected each completed chapter to his downtime screen use. Once he finishes a chapter, he earns a game he can choose during his next screen-time break. He knows exactly what he needs to complete, and I don’t have to repeatedly negotiate how many pages count as “enough.”

Everybody wins. Or at least everybody complains slightly less.

I especially like that the book mixes in the number activities he already feels confident doing with the reading and word-recognition practice that requires a little more effort. He gets some quick wins while still working on the skills we want to strengthen before first grade.

We are not trying to recreate a full school day at home. Some days we do a chapter. Some days we are busy, everyone is tired and the workbook stays exactly where we left it.

But having one small, achievable goal has made summer practice feel much less overwhelming—for both of us. He gets to work toward something he enjoys, I know we’re keeping those kindergarten skills fresh, and we still have plenty of time left for the important summer curriculum: playing outside, eating snacks and asking me when screen time starts.

Parent Picks

We have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. Below are the Brain Quest books we’re using this summer to keep on track.

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.