During the Day: Car Color Parade

I know that many of my During the Day posts appear fairly simple, but I believe that as parents, we tend to over think about the activities that keep our children busy.  Not everyday needs to be filled with "new" and "exciting" things, most of the games or toys that my children love are modest, easy to find and return to ideas.  When I find myself perusing blogs filled with children's activities, I am often overwhelmed about the lists of of things I "need" to be the best parent.  I don't want to buy more stuff, store more stuff or pretend that I care about more stuff.  So this is my answer --scaled back,  greatly nurtured, simple and solid, everyday activities for my children. 

Once you get a car, you get a million.  Am I right or am I right?  I know we find ourselves trying to figure out how that happened, but it did and now you have a bin with fifty bazillion little toy cars.

I started this game as way to circumvent the need to "race" cars with mom all the time.  Bug loved the  parade idea immediately.  At first we would line up the cars in parade order.  We would start with emergency vehicles, then military, next would be the fancy old cars and we would end with fancy new cars.  I have very little knowledge about car nomenclature, so there was a lot of guessing.

From there, it got all educational and we started separating the cars into color families.  Violet always has the worst showing.  You might find it completely missing from your car collection.   

Often, non-cars join in on the fun.  Trains, construction vehicles and obviously Harold.

Sometimes Jeep gets timed on how fast he can get the cars into their color families and sometimes he times me.  This is also a great start game.  You start it, they finish it.  You walk away and let them take it wherever they need it to go.