Last month, Bunchland launched our BlogHer contest. First prize was joining Bunch creative director Rebecca Brown at the conference in New York City, sharing her hotel room at the Hilton and scoring a ticket to the BlogHer 2010 conference in New York City. Entrants had to answer the question “What’s the awesomest thing your family has ever done?” to qualify. The votes have been tallied, and the BlogHer contest winner is Daniela Syrovy. She gets to hightail it up at our Bunch party and schmooze with all-female blog superstars. Congrats! You can check out Daniela’s winning entry below.
Our family is the definition of awesome. For years my hubby and I owned a fast food, old-school burger joint. We lived in the basement, we partied, we worked, I was the fries to his burger. Then I got surprise pregnant and bam! We bought a house and got our shit together. I had the baby, and 9 months later was pregnant with our second. We were burning the midnight oil and the candle at both ends, so we said fuck it and sold Big Burger. Read more...
A recipe for gourmet ice cream sandwiches from the family behind White Squirrel Coffee Shop and an affogato bonus
David, the owner of Toronto’s White Squirrel Coffee Shop, and his family made this video to share a sweet how-to for gourmet ice cream sandwiches (his is a foodie’s version of the classic corner store chocolate cookie kind) and affagato (also known as ice cream drowned in espresso). In this video, once they’ve shown us how it’s done, David and his wife Shawna and their two long-locked boys hang outside their shop and rap about ice cream and cookie flavour pairings. Plus, they’re letting us share their cookie recipe with you guys. If you’re anything like us, after watching this you’ll be jonesing for a scoop, in which case we suggest you take a stroll to your local parlour, preferably one that makes their own stuff. Read more...
Now that you’ve made your ice cream sandwich cookies, you need something to smoosh between their yummy, chewy centers. With cookies this good, nothing but the finest gourmet ice cream will do. If you live in North America, you’re in luck, as some of the world’s best frozen desserts are made right here at home and can be bought somewhere in your hood or even shipped to your doorstep (try going through the site IceCreamSource.com). Here are our favourite picks (betcha can’t try them all!):
Our tips for the funnest, awesomest Canada Day/Fourth of July family fireworks display
World record-setting fireworks in Dubai by Grucci
Canada Day and the Fourth of July are around the corner, and if your family is anything like ours you’ll be stocking up on armloads of pinwheels, glitter fountains and sparklers to create your own fireworks show at your cottage or in a park. But before you go firing them off all willy-nilly, check out our tips for creating a slicker presentation that will turn blowing stuff up into a cherished family tradition.
But first, a few words about safety. Set off your fireworks in a wide, open space, keep a bucket of sand handy to extinguish errant flames, and have everyone but the designated shooter (i.e. someone sober) seated as far away from the fireworks as humanly possible. Oh, and keep your cats and dogs inside: they have sensitive earsies and don’t like loud fireworks as much as you do. For more safety tips, check out this article (those fathers over at Geek Dad know what they’re talking about). Read more...
Ken Denmead writes about geeky projects parents and kids can do together on the Geek Dad (part of Wired) blog and in the newly released Geek Dad book. As a kid, Ken claims he had ”serious geeky tendencies” but could hold his own at sports (“so I never had sand kicked in my face or anything”). He came from a family of engineers and physicists and had an uncle who got him hooked on The Hobbit by reading it aloud using different voices. He and his dad also built a train track in his bedroom on a piece of plywood that could be folded up against the wall like a Murphy bed. Read more...
Camping is fun, but if you want to make it in-tents (get it?), take all your friends and their kids with you! Bunchland contributor Kessa and Bunch creative director Rebecca Brown are part of a close-knit group of kids and parents who stay bonded though their annual camping trip.
Keep reading and they’ll let you in on the secrets of their tradition, which include a MacGyvered bouncy house, an inter-tent mail system and a child-minding strategy that allows the grownups time to drink beer around a crackling fire.
The pre-planning
The leadup to the big trip usually starts a few months in advance, with the first order of business: booking your campsite. Don’t sleep on this crucial detail, the popular sites fill up fast! Shoot emails back and forth and circulate a shared document (such as a Google doc) where families sign up for cooking and other duties and compare checklists of what to bring, who has what allergies or food preferences and which families have extra flashlights and folding chairs. Read more...
So when we asked Tury to describe some FriendsWithYou-inspired ways for you guys to play with your kids, we were unsurprised that “come home dressed as a magical being” was one of them, but we felt a bit uncertain that they were actually doable, by anyone other than, you know, Tury. So we tried them out ourselves. Read more...
