SerpApi.Org
Before she was Erin Hannon bouncing around the reception desk on The Office, or the improbably sunny title character of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a role Tina Fey reportedly wrote specifically for her, Ellie Kemper was a kid in St. Louis taking improv classes from a teacher named Jon Hamm, years before the two of them would end up on screen together. She studied English at Princeton, spent a year at Oxford, wrote for The Onion, and by most reasonable math should have ended up somewhere quieter than network television. She didn’t.
These days she’s a working parent of two boys, six and nine, figuring out summer the same way the rest of us are, one week at a time, without a script. We talked parent to parent about what’s actually getting her through it, and she was honest about the parts that stress her out too. Here’s what’s worth stealing.
Keep a bin kids can raid without asking
The single most reliable move in Kemper’s house isn’t a specific craft, it’s access. She keeps a stash of old Halloween costumes on hand year round, plus regular clothes she’s fine with getting repurposed into whatever a kid decides they need that day. No permission required, no adult greenlight, just a bin they can walk up to. That’s the idea behind Captain’s Closet, one of the activities in Captain Bob’s Summer Quest, the free activity guide Kemper partnered on with Pirate’s Booty this summer. The guide is a collection of no-prep, low-mess projects parents can pull out on demand that’s available as a free download. Kemper says she keeps the ideas “kind of in my pocket,” ready to break out the second a day needs rescuing.
It’s also, by her own account, the exact setup that turned her into an actress. She grew up with a big cardboard box of mismatched costumes at home, no theme, no matching pieces, just a pile she and her siblings would dive into. “One thing leads to another,” she said. “Suddenly you have this whole narrative going.” She still puts on plays for a living. The dots aren’t subtle.
Try the broom-handle flag trick
If you want one specific project to copy this week, this is the one Kemper says her kids keep coming back to. Grab a broom handle, an old t shirt, and some sponge paint, and let your kid turn it into a pirate flag. It takes minutes to set up, there’s very little to clean, and it gives a kid a prop that fuels an afternoon of imaginative play well after the paint dries.
Give yourself the craft pass
Kemper wants you to know that a working actress with an English degree from Princeton also finds craft time stressful. “I am not always so good with, I guess, fine motor skills,” she admitted, specifically citing drawing and painting as things that stress her out. Her workaround is picking low mess, low fuss activities and skipping anything that asks for more setup than payoff. She’s direct about why that matters to her. Activities that ask little of parents, she said, “reduce stress and anxiety all around.”
That’s worth borrowing as an actual filter. Before you commit to a project, ask what you’re buying yourself for the time they’ll actually stay interested and mess involved, what she jokingly called parenting ROI. “What’s the payoff?” she said. “Investment versus payoff. What’s my return on investment?” If the investment doesn’t match the payoff, it’s fine to skip it.
Play for ten minutes, then step back
Kemper’s actual parenting style splits the difference between hands on and hands off. Her approach is popping in to play for a little while, getting an activity started, and then stepping back so her kids can run with it on their own. “I can set them up with the materials that they need, and I can play with them,” she said. “And I can also dip out.” It’s a useful middle ground for parents who feel guilty either hovering too much or checking out entirely. You don’t have to choose one mode for the whole summer. Ten minutes of buy in from you can be enough to launch hours of independent play.
Permission to not program every hour
Kemper’s summer permission slip, both to other parents and to herself, is to stop trying to fill every hour of every day. It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, and like most of us, myself included, her own parents never did it for her. We all turned out fine without it, and she’s betting the same math still works for her own kids.
You don’t need a packed calendar to have a good summer. A stocked bin, a broom handle flag, and permission to let a project be simple might cover more ground than an elaborate one ever would.
