Unforgettable Childhood

After a year of letting this blog sit without typing a single word I have decided that I needed to come back and write here again. One never quite knows where life will take you. And life has brought me back to this place. After five years of being at home with my kids, my youngest started kindergarten this year and I headed back to work.

Fortunately, my work has taken me to the school, where I am surrounded by kids everyday. Now I have the opportunity to not only create memories for my own kids, but I have the opportunity to create memories for many kids.

I realized one night, as I was laying awake thinking about new art projects and how I was going to teach multiplication x3 to third graders, that maybe this blog is exactly where I should be writing.

So here I am, starting a new chapter, in a very familiar place. As my middle daughter once said, when you are exploring and discovering it is called Excovering. So I guess you can say that I am reexcovering ways to create memories that will last a lifetime with kids.

I made a list today of all of the amazing things I want to do with this blog.

I have good intentions, but moving and summer put together have put a hold on all of those good intentions.

As we get settled in, I hope to post on a regular schedule with all of the fun activities we have on our agenda. We are working on writing right now and this weekend we are off exploring. In the next couple of weeks we hope to visit DeSmet, South Dakota. One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood homes.

But for now, I am joining in for New Friend Friday with a few pictures of our summer fun.

I hope to see you back here at Unforgettable Childhood. The purpose of this blog was to spend quality time with my girls, creating, exploring and learning.

With the busyness of our culture today we have to be intentional with our kids. We have to take back our family time from society. We have to teach them to use their imaginations. We have to be purposeful in limiting technology time and encourage active, outdoor time.

I can’t wait to share my ideas with you in the next few weeks, but right now the sun is shining in South Dakota and we are off to play.

I just checked out a cool new promotional site for Rayovac. They are hosting a summer promotion to win cool prizes every day. All you have to do is go here and answer their questions of the day for a chance to win.

Today’s question is all about your camping style. You know. . . we don’t exactly rough it with our camper, but we love to get outside and really enjoy the outdoors. We just love to have a place to go when a storm hits

I am excited to be a part of this promotion, who doesn’t love cool prizes. Make sure you visit their site every day for a chance to win.

Also on Wednesday, June 30th Janice and Susan from 5 Minutes for Mom will be hosting a Rayovac Twitter Party!

Date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Time: 7:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. CST
Location: #rayovac
Follow: @Rayovac_Battery, @5minutesformom, @CirclePRMary

You can also “Like” Rayovac on Facebook to learn more details.

I hope to tweet with you on Wednesday, June 30th.

I hope I win some of the cool prizes, how about you?

The first 99 bloggers to promote the Rayovac Powers Your Summer Twitter Event won a prize package from Rayovac

I couldn’t start the summer posts without a few from our trip. It was an amazing time for our family. We shared lots of laughs and a few tears. We learned quickly that meltdown was going to happen at about 3pm each day. We worked through it, took a break and kept going to we all dropped.

Disney World truly is a place that every family needs to experience at least once.

We started our second day bright and early at Sea World. We all loved it!

Next stop, Animal Kingdom. I think we voted this as one of our favorite parks of the trip.

Magic Kingdom with three girls under 10, truly a magical place!

We were glad we decided to go to Disney Hollywood Studios. Playhouse Disney was a hit for Nadia and the Rockin’ Roller Coaster was the older girls favorite ride.

Our last Disney day would not have been complete without a visit with Daisy Duck. The girls were on the lookout for her all week. Thankfully she was right past the gate when we arrived so the girls got her signature and they felt their autograph books were complete.

We also enjoyed a little time at the beach. After two days of sun, we spent the third day near the pool and a few beach umbrellas.

Now we are at Grandma and Grandpa’s and summer is in full swing with reading, gymnastics and softball. I am wishing that I had rainy day kits ready to go because the days have been filled with a lot of rain!

We have spent a lot of time inside reading. My girls love to read. I can’t wait to share more about their favorite finds so far this summer.

We are going on our second week at Grandma and Grandpa’s House. We are here until we can get settled into a house after the move. The days have been interesting. . .

Nadia takes after her Grandpa. They are both very strong-willed so we have our moments. Things have been so crazy we have not had a lot of time for planned activities and structure. I am working hard on trying to get our summer a little more scheduled before we are all crazy.

Here are a few pictures of the fun we have been having so far.

We all love fun at Aunt Sara and Uncle Brad’s Farm.

Nothing says summer like a good old fashioned water balloon fight.

Rainy Days = Dress-up with Grandpa’s Boots

Our first camping trip of the year.

What is on your family agenda for Summer Fun?

Summer officially began for our household on May 21st when we left for vacation, but tomorrow we are back to reality and our summer vacation at home begins.

The summer will be filled with crafting, gardening, exploring and camping. We have a lot of fun plans to discover new things and revisit places we love.

Beginning June 3rd we will spend the summer at Unforgettable Childhood sharing great ways for your family to celebrate summer together. Join the fun!

I invited my friend Chele from The Bona Fide to guest post today. She lives in a beautiful place in North Carolina that I would love to visit someday. I asked her to share a travel article from her area. Make sure you stop by her blog and say hello!

First I want to say with 4 children ages 4, 7, 12 and 14, it is very hard to have the patience to go places like this with them. My fear of things going wrong when we visit places like this usually keeps us from not trying it. We don’t do it often enough. However it is so costly for a family of six to do things like this but this past trip was a huge success and we will be making more time to do these kinds of things with our children!

We live on the coast of Southeastern North Carolina. There are many things to do around here. However we did take a 2 hour and 15 minute trip with some folks from church to New Bern, North Carolina. We went to see the historical place called   Tryon Palace. In colonial times it was the capital of North Carolina for awhile. I’m not going to go into all of the history here but it was a beautiful town with lots of history!

On the ride up our 4 year old did take a nap which I think really helped us!! He was shockingly good all day long!

We took a look through the Palace itself… that actually took all morning. All 4 of my children were into it! All of the cool things they had back then! It sure was a history lesson for all of us! We were able to walk through the original horse stables and we got to see the separate kitchen building and how they made wool spools! It was pretty neat! My seven year old daughter said this was her favorite place because it made her feel like a princess! Ha-Ha!

Next, we went to the park by the water to eat our picnic. We brought sandwiches, chips, drinks and some cookies. They enjoyed that because this weekend actually was during a car show! So we watched the cool cars as we ate!

At this time, we saw this poor blue jay. It must have fallen from the tree it wasn’t even able to fly yet. My hubby put it in a safe place because pigeons were trying to peck at the poor thing. This was my 4 year old son’s highlight of the day. He is still talking about it days later and asking us if we think he is okay!

We went back to the palace area and went to a 30 minute show about John Lawson and his trunk of dead animal skins. I can’t say that was my highlight but my kids enjoyed being able to see a fox, skunk and so on up close!

Next, we went to the Hay house. This was the coolest thing! They were dressed in period clothes, the house was the original house from the 1800’s and we all sat in their living room just as we would today and chatted. The wife and daughter of this Hay house actually talked the way they talked back then! For example, my 4 year old son said to the lady of the house “I like dinosaurs!” And she looked at me and back at him and asked “dinosaurs?” Ha-ha! They even showed some kids games from back then and shared with my children how they were played! Everyone had a blast here!

We did much more but I could write a series. If you live in this area or ever visit, be sure to check out the Tryon Palace. Our whole family enjoyed this day trip together. We need to do things like this more often! We all should be doing this with our children, not only is it bonding time but it also is education for our children! They won’t ever forget this trip they took with their parents!