Recovering from Weekend Fun
June 16, 2008
“ooo, ouch, ugh, grrr”…. Oh! uh, hello…it’s morning already, huh? Ya, that bright light hitting my eyes surely must be the sun.
When I gave you all that wonderful advice and ideas for filling out your Family Fun activity planner did I mention anything in there about making sure you don’t overdo the fun for your poor body? Oh, I didn’t? (alrighty now! you can quit throwing those stinky ice packs at me! knock it off you there in the back; I saw that!) Gimme a break okay? I kind of went overboard with the fun this weekend too.
Who knew that having fun could be so exhausting? Well let’s see what I did this weekend…
Acted as slave driver to get the kids to hurry up and make the house nice and clean before grandma and grandpa showed up at the wee early hour of 10:30 am. (have you noticed that I hate mornings?)
Drove 20 miles north to go out to lunch with my mom, step-dad, and all the kids to celebrate Father’s Day and my step-dad and my daughter’s birthday. Stopped at the store after lunch to pick up some birthday cards for another birthday party that afternoon. Of course after driving 20 miles north of home you have to drive that same 20 miles south to go back home.
Once back home I returned all the calls that came while I was gone — I never get many calls when I’m home but it seems like everyone I know has some sort of 6th sense that tells them I have left the house! I also signed the cards and put together the bag needed for swimming and fun at the birthday party (forgot the suntan lotion — I need to make a list!)
Drove 15 miles south to the birthday party and spent the next four hours holding babies, kissing booboos, munching, chatting with family and friends, and all the other fun stuff that goes along with it.
My “man child” son was home for a half-weekend visit and I had to take him to a respite foster home after the party so we had to drive another 10 miles south. Guess what? All this flooding caused a road to be closed–now make that 10 miles into 18!
So now we are a total of 33 miles south of home and guess what? Yep if you drive 33 miles south of home you have to drive 33 miles north to get back home. But wait! Once we were back into town we had to stop at the store again to pick up stuff for smores. We got a last minute invite to go to a friend’s house for a bonfire.
After the store we headed home to whip up a pie to bake at their house, grabbed everyone a change of clothes, and headed 10 miles west of home for the bonfire! Well it was fun — we roasted plain marshmallows, we roasted smores, and they had refreshments (Pepsi of all things!) for the kids.
Finally at 11 pm we were ready to… yep, drive the 10 miles east to get back home. We unloaded the Jeep and I had everyone either jump in the bathtub or take sponge baths to get the bug spray off. I was surprised that the kids fell asleep so easily after consuming caffeine that late but within minutes of crawling into bed they were sound asleep.
I thought I’d sit down and work on my administrative assistant website and get some much needed updates done; but guess what? I too was soon fast asleep at the computer.
Sunday dawned bright and early as usual but not one of us saw much of the morning as we were all just barely crawling out of bed at well past 10 am. I treated everyone to donuts and tall glasses of milk for breakfast. About noon their motors were revved up and they were outside playing with their friends. (very loudly I might add — I spent quite a bit of time outside playing referee!)
This morning I’m moving quite slowly — it seems I have aches and pains in places that I didn’t know could hurt; and what in the world did I do to my ankle? It hurts so much I can barely move it!
Well anyway, if you’re going to plan for a whole day of family fun, you might want to consider how much “fun” you can stand before your body starts to protest in a very loud and obnoxious manner!
Have a great Monday, everyone!
The Kids Make Their Summer Vacation Plans
June 13, 2008
It’s been raining for days and days here in Wisconsin. Just take a look at what happened in Wisconsin Dells which isn’t too far from me: FEMA Tours Damage At Lake Delton Thursday.
We’ve been having rain, rain, and more rain and more is on the way. We’ve been under flood watches for the past several days and the Wisconsin River is right in front of my house. (it doesn’t look too bad right now, though).
So this weekend I’m going to work with the kids to create a summer activity journal. I decided to make this as simple as possible and just purchased some spiral bound sketch pads for them. As we go on trips and do the various things listed in my summer activity planner the children can draw pictures or write journal entries about where we went and what we did. (Read about our Summer Activity Planner)
I also want them to make their own list of things they want to do or accomplish this summer. When they have their lists completed I will have them attach them to the front of their journal. Each week I’m going to set aside some time for them to look over their lists and make sure they are accomplishing the things they wanted to do. On the inside of the back cover of their journals I attached the list of activities that we are planning to do this summer. This will help them to see what is coming up and be able to look forward to these special days without bugging me about what we’re going to be doing.
After the past several days of nothing but rain the kids are already moaning about nothing to do on rainy days. So I’m going to have them create a rainy day activity jar. Deborah Taylor-Hough created an incredible 200+ Summertime Activities for Kids. I’ve printed this list out for my kids and we’re going to cut apart all the ones they want to do on rainy days and then we’ll put them in a jar. When the kids get bored they can simply pull an activity out of the jar and voila’ instant fun! (I hope!)
I homeschooled my kids for 7 years and even though I’m not able to homeschool now their education is still an important goal to me. So I do everything I can to encourage them to pursue anything educational. I’m also very aware of the declining writing skills of children in public schools and since I love to write it is very important to me that my kids have very good writing skills. So we are going to create a journal jar filled with writing prompts for them to write about or they can color a picture instead. I found a list of over 200 prompts at Teacher.net. I copied and pasted the prompts into a document to have the kids cut them out and put them into a jar. They’ve already been doing really good with their daily school lessons and so now since they are in that routine I want them to write a short bit every day as well.
For the most part that’s our rainy day weekend plans. We’re also going to be taking my step-dad out to Golden Corral on Saturday for Father’s Day and for his birthday as well. We also have a kids birthday party to go to in the afternoon. I hope everyone else has a great weekend too!
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out my weekly Suviving Summertime newsletter. You can be sure you’ll find some great ideas!
