School's Out For Summer!

Travis Family Sensational Summer of Six

 

 

So here it begins, my summer series, in an attempt to make it the "Best Summer Ever!" for our family I have lost my mind in an ocean of over the top planning and organization! And I'm having a ball so far! Their excitement and delight is totally worth it.  I have done the bucket list thing several years on several different levels and it's totally up my alley but often I stare at the list not knowing what to do next.  I wanted to plan it out more specifically and while cruising on Pinterest I knew whose page to look at, my friend Katie who is like the modern day Mary Poppins, has the best Pinterest page ever and when I started looking through her boards I got the idea to do weekly themes and organize the activities, recipes, crafts, books around the theme. 

 

So this Friday when the girls got off the bus from a half day I informed them of the afternoon plan, we had to do a little preparation to get ready to have all the fun we were going to have.  First up was cleaning the room I loosely call the office/craft room but when life is hectic becomes the room where we stash stuff to get it out of the way. Let's just say life had been very very hectic lately.  It was admittedly a rough start to cleaning, there was some bickering and a lot of distraction (they wanted to show me all their end of the year papers and I was using that as the once-we-get-the-room-cleaned-we-will-do-that bribe). But eventually we managed to work together and got the room fairly spic and span just as Charlotte woke up and Daddy got home with his super-relaxed summertime grin from ear to ear.  Let the fun begin....

 

Next stop: Library
Since books can be checked out for 2 weeks at a time we will have biweekly trips to the library to get books to go with our themes and we got the girls registered for the summer reading program. Grace had a ton of fun running around helping me look for books on our various topics and picking out a few chapter books for herself.  We left armed with 2 big bags of books, I have always made going to the library a serious job with my kids, I so want them to grow up loving books as I do. I have vivid memories of library trips with my Mom as a kid, kneeling before the stacks, selecting the books that looked fun or going back to favorite shelves again and again.  And that smell, isn't the smell of library books the best!? But I digress....

 

We happened upon the library the same night as a small little carnival to kick off summer.  It sure added to the air of excitement for our girls.  In fact I think they thought I planned it on purpose, I scored some accidental awesome mom points! I'll take those wherever I can get them. Then hungry for dinner we hustled off to our all time favorite family restaurant:

 

 

We used the Trivial Pursuit Family Addition app on the back of the Heinz ketchup and played a trivia game.  The highlight was when there was a question about a book, "The Day the Crayons Quit" and who pipes up with "I know that book!" Sophie, my 6 year old, and she got the answer right and her beaming smile was worth it's weight in gold!

After dinner we went home to have a campfire, unveil the whole plan to the kids, have s'mores (of course!) and start our  weekly family devotional time. This will be my assistant for the summer, our bag of fun that I will pack with the essentials needed for whatever we are doing.  Tonight it had the Summer Fun Binder, s'more ingredients, marshmallow skewers, fire color crystals, and the camera!

 

The kids were crazy jazzed to see the binder of fun I made.  They looked through all the pages and squealed at the different crafts and recipes they saw.  They talked about what themes they were most excited about. 

The s'mores were the perfect treat to start off summer.  Of course a fire with a toddler is always "tricky" and I was super paranoid and considered duct taping her to the chair so I could help with roasting marshmallows and prepping s'mores without worrying about her getting too close.  I had thought that the JUMBO marshmallows would be fun, I'd never bought them before.  In reality they were too gigantic for the kids. Charlotte downed her s'more dismantled and then declared "Night night!" and went right up to bed.  She was clearly done for the day.  Poor Sophie overwhelmed by the giant marshmallow got it on her sweatshirt, face, hair and her mostly her hands were "too sticky to handle" so she eventually gave up on her treat and snuggled up and decided to wait for the "color show".   Grace however ate two giant s'mores, that girl eats everything in sight lately, she must be on the verge of a growth spurt!

She led us in campfire songs.  Then we started our family devotions and we added the magical color crystals to the fire, the girls got excited each time they saw a new color show up!

 

Another amazing lady who inspires me is my friend Melody, the illustrious creator of the website grkids.com which has become an amazing source of info and inspiration to parents all over the greater Grand Rapids area. She jump started me on this plan just by simply announcing her latest series, "How to Turn Your Summer Plans into Reality - A Mom with a Plan" series.  I thought, "I want to be a mom with a plan!" This series is really great, and has me adding things last minute to my already elaborate plans for the summer. You should tune in and check it out if you haven't already, it's great!  Anyways another idea Melody inspired me with she mentioned on Facebook the other day about using "Fruit of the Spirit" points with her kids where she was going to give them points for displaying the attributes of specific fruit to earn points as incentive for fun outings.  I wanted a consistent devotional theme for our family for the whole summer.  So we are following her lead and focusing on the fruit of the spirit.  My kids know a super fun song about the fruit of the spirit that they learned at Awana which we sang around our fire.  We read the passage about the fruit of the spirit in Galatians and did a general devotional about it, then we started on the first fruit, love, and read the 1 Corinthians passage about love.  We then talked about how we can show love to each other, how we can extend love to others and how in doing so we show love to God.  Then we plan to frequently talk about love throughout the week.  I have already used that to praise the kids when I see them going the extra mile for each other and used it as redirection when I see them acting in a way that is unloving.  I'm very excited about this aspect of our summer as well.  When I was editing the pictures of the fire, I stumbled up on this shot of a heart shaped flame!  God was present in our fire, I'm sure of it!

 

Next up on the blog I will show you some of the day to day structure and nuts and bolts of our plan, new house rules, cleaning schedules, the organization behind the scenes of all the fun! I am thrilled to be starting this summer off with a plan, albeit slightly afraid of my own ambition! First up is the theme of "Dress up" which involves a circus day, a pirate day, a fairy tea party and much more.  Tune in next weekend to see how it went!