Mother-Daughter Date Idea: Cocoa & Coloring

It’d been a busy couple of weeks, and my tween daughter and I needed to connect. I wanted to come up with a fun activity we’d both enjoy but that wouldn’t cost a lot or take us far from home. I found the inspiration for this cocoa & coloring mother-daughter date idea at Target.

Parenting a tween or teen daughter is not an easy task. You suddenly find yourself needing to balance:

increasingly busy schedules,
the onset of puberty and hormones,
plus the all the junior high drama.

Being proactive in connecting with your tween or teen daughter is crucial for this stage of life. But when you’re also parenting her other (in our case, four younger) siblings, finding time to just be “you and her” can be a struggle.

We try to carve out mother-daughter dates on a regular basis, and we’re always looking for new ways to spend time together without spending a lot of money.

Finding Inspiration for a Mother-Daughter Date

One of our favorite winter mother-daughter date ideas is to go to a local coffee shop and grab our favorite hot drinks. This month, we weren’t able to get away from the house for our mother-daughter date, so I decided to bring the coffee shop home.

I was inspired by all the fun cocoa and coffee-themed items I found in the Target Dollar Spot recently.

I grabbed a fun Hot Cocoa serving tray, a couple of mugs, and a serving bowl for our mother-daughter date.

When I’m at Target and have some money in the budget for fun splurges, I like to browse the end-caps for clearance items. The stationary/craft aisles are one of my must-browse areas.

I found a pack of 38 Sharpies on clearance for only $15! (I won’t tell you how bummed I was that this same set was marked down to $9 the next week.)

Knowing how much we both enjoy coloring, I picked up the Sharpies and added them to my cart.

Planning a Mother-Daughter Date

When my daughter got home from school, I told her what I’d found at Target, and she was excited. We immediately looked at the calendar to see if we could pencil in some time to drink cocoa and color together.

A few days later, we found time to connect with cocoa and coloring.

Enjoying a Mother-Daughter Date

We used a coloring book I’d received as a Christmas present a year or so ago, and the inspiration from Scripture was the perfect catalyst for our conversation.

It was a great mother-daughter date!

Other Mother-Daughter Date Ideas

I love that this particular mother-daughter date idea can be tweaked for various ages: just change the drinks and/or the coloring supplies to match your daughter’s preferences and age!

But maybe coloring and cocoa aren’t your thing (or maybe it’s the middle of summer).