In my picture search, which I will write a post about and share what I've learned later this week, I found pictures of our past summer activities. I thought I'd post them here and share ideas to help other moms and dads that are feeling the way I do as a fun summer vacation starts.
One of the things I do the first week of summer is to sit down with the kids and we make a reading challenge. One year we decided if that we, as a family, read 40 books by a certain date, we'd go to Kings Island--one of our local theme parks. When our goal was met, the kids had a meeting without us knowing and then informed us they wanted a Wii instead of a trip to Kings Island. "Instead of one day of family fun, we can have family fun all the time!...AND it's cheaper!" Who can argue with that?! Another year we went camping, we went to Lake Erie, etc. After our challenge has been decided, we go to our local library and sign up for the summer reading program. This is a more fun thing for the younger kids because many of the toys and trinkets are geared for younger kiddos. I'm excited about this because after 20 years of motherhood all of us can FINALLY ride bikes to the library and without training wheels too!! I love that all but one of my kids loves to read. I won't get on a big soapbox here about reading but I will say that I think if a child learns to read at a young age, other things in life come a bit easier. Imagination, vocabulary, quick thinking, even math. We've always had a specific place in our house just for reading. In my dream home, I will have a whole room as a library with bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling.
reading room is an alcove in big girls' room. Cornice above window is our favorite bookcovers photocopied & decoupaged onto the wood.
homemade bookshelves copied from Ikea spice racks.
Ikea was sold out, so we made our own version
Painted on one of the reading room walls is one of my favorite quotes,
from one of my fav Dr. Seuss books. Oh The Places You'll Go
I take the kids on what we call "surprise trips". I have two very cool books about Ohio that I use to find fun, unique and kid friendly things to do. With a 12 year age gap, I always worry about losing interest in either the younger kids or the older kids and for different reasons. I am so happy to say that for the most part all the kids are pretty happy with everything we've done. I believe it's the in the delivery of the trip news and the attitude of the parent. Sometimes I'll enlist the help of one of my older daughters so they can help rally the troops. I found pictures of some of my favorite things we've done. I'll post them below with descriptions. Lots of them are free, most are very inexpensive and only a few have I paid for and had to actually budget for them. I also have a travel time limit, but now that my youngest is 7, the age my oldest was when I started doing these, I can lengthen that travel time. When we wake up the morning I've decided we're going, I yell, "surprise trip!" I've packed the car ahead of time and have movies, activities or games ready for the length of trip. Once we're all in the car I give them three letters as clues. The letters usually are the name of the location, what we will see or the town we are going. My favorite trip was to see 2 castles. I gave the letters, C, Q, K...Kings and Queens live in Castles. For the zoo I would give everything but Z... A, E, S--apes, elephants, snakes. The kids play 20 questions..sometimes it's 10 questions and others it's 50 to guess where we're going. The chatter I hear from the backseats are often so worth keeping it a secret.
Mac O Cheek Castle, West Liberty, Ohio
super cool place! And the Ohio Carverns are nearby, literally a cool place
For a family our size, it's quite often cheaper to buy a season pass than to pay to go in just once. Our zoo, for instance is costs us $75 or $85 to go once, while a zoo pass for our family is $90 (or was last year) but we can go in for a couple hours and not worry about the money we spent for just an hour or two. And passes like this are often reciprocal and can be used to get in free or a huge discount at other zoos or museums.
Natural museum of history and petting zoo,Cleveland
Sometimes just pitching the tent in the backyard creates hours of happiness.
This was taken several yrs ago. I can't find recent pix of tent fun.
I always struggle with a pool pass. Our town pool passes increased in price this year and I have trouble paying that for only 2 months of swimming. June is often too cold to swim or the water hasn't warmed up yet and the kids won't go in. However, it is a very nice bribe to get the kids moving on their "lazy" days. "We will go swimming after you've picked up the yard, mowed the lawn." "Weeded your part of the garden." "Tidied your room...." I will probably break down and buy a pool pass but I do struggle with it every summer, especially when the kids start begging to go. Who wants to be the mean mom, really?
On rainy days or when the kids start getting crabby with one another I will have a bake off with them. All of my kids can cook and even Nate (7) knows the very basics of cooking. I will somehow team the kids up and then let them raid cookbooks & the internet for whatever theme I've offered. They make a list of what they need, we go shopping if we need to, and they start baking. I supervise the fun and then we enlist Jim and sweet neighbors to be the judges. The kids think this is the most fun of all. The "boys" always make a big deal of testing everything and being official.
Making chocolate magic.
the judging begins! This time the theme was raspberry.
Things to judge: a raspberry drink, lemon raspberry crepes, chocolate raspberry tart.
I hope this helps start the creative juices flowing with others that are trying find ways to keep summer fun, cheap, happy and the sibling squabbles to a minimum. Summer is a great time to make happy memories. Start now!!
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