The other day, my husband and I were pretty bored, but the kids were having a really bad day - think major breakdowns and tears every few minutes. Needless to say, we knew that it would be a disaster to take them out in public, so we decided to stay at home instead.
However, as their parents, we also knew that we could only handle so many breakdowns and tears in one day, so we tried to think of a way to redirect their "really bad day" into something really fun! My husband had recently competed in a Spartan Race and the kids had been rather obsessed with their "Daddy jumping over fire" so we created a Mini-Spartan Obstacle Course right in our very own backyard.
Now no Spartan Race is ever complete without becoming completely filty, so we made sure to incorporate lots of water and dirt activities. The best thing about our Mini-Spartan Obstacle Course is that we didn't have to buy a single thing to create it. We just opened up the garage, pulled out a bunch of stuff and set it up.
The whole point of a Spartan Race is to have fun - but to be challenged - so make sure your course has lots of ups-and-downs. Let your imaginations run wild, and have a blast setting up your very own course.
How To Create Your Own Kids' Spartan Race:
1.) Start off with some sort of water activity. This way they'll be nice and cool while they compete. We used our old Little Tikes pool. They had to go down the slide and then run across the pool.
2.) Then we had them climb. Our kids are still pretty young, so we did the climbing part early on. We had them climb up the rope ladder of our Creative Playthings swing set and then go down the slide.
3.) It was really hot that day so when they came down the slide they landed on the Slip-N-Slide and crawled to the end. Cool kids = happy kids. :)
4.) To keep their heart rates up, they bunny-hopped through a series of old Hula Hoops.
5.) Our son is really into Angry Birds right now, so we used some chalk to create the Big Piggy target. They had to fill up their water guns and couldn't leave the area until they squirted the Big Piggy in the face.
6.) After the Big Piggy got what he deserved, they had to crawl under our hammock, jump on their trikes, and then zoom over the finish line - aka: our green hose.
The key point was to have fun, but to also encourage our kids to support each other. To do this, we let each child have their own turn in the Spartan Spotlight and while they were competing, the rest of us cheered them on Spartan Style - with lots of hoots, hollers and screams!
P.S. It's even more fun when Dad competes too, and Mom acts like the paparazzi crawling after the kids taking pictures.
Happy Racing, Denine
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](http://www.weknowstuff.us.com/validatom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
