Camping Week

The summer fighting has begun. My kids need some structure or some activities to keep them from fighting. I usually have crafts set up and a day to cook or bake something, we do a field trip once a week, maybe the $1 movie at the theatre but this year with the baby its been hard to get anything set up.

I can't stand all the fighting that has begun now though. My two younger boys play together really well. They will go outside and jump on the trampoline play outside with toys, in the dirt or mud. But its been raining a ton so they haven't been playing outside as much. They have good imaginations and play with toys and come up with things inside but then they get fighting and I want to rip my hair out so I sat down on the computer and thought I can do a week at a time so this week we are doing a camping week.
Our activities for camping week is as follows:

We are going to the library to get books on camping. I ordered one from the kids last book order of the year. Mercer Mayer's Little Critter book Me and My Dad and they go camping.

Make indoor forts or tent with blankets etc.
Tell ghost stories
Let them sleep in it at night

For cooking and baking:

Hobo dinners
Another dinner night will be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. (the weather is supposed to clear up and be good this week except one day)

Make smores and trail mix.

Make Banana boats for dessert one night.

Go on a walk and gather twigs, leaves, rocks, etc

For crafts we are going to do:

Camping Paintings-
we will use our twigs, rocks, leaves and stuff from our walk.

Camping Collage- they can make with the leftover stuff from the walk and I'll print out a few pictures too.

Make stick men- have them hunt for sticks and glue their own stick men together along with googly eyes.

Make grocery sack backpacks

Make glow in the dark pictures that they can see while they are sleeping in their tent.

Coloring and some activities on paper about camping.

So this is my plan for this week. Hopefully the weather will hold out maybe I'll let them sleep out in the backyard but the mosquitos are so bad after all the rain. Hopefully this will make my week go by faster.

Busy Summer Days

I am such a bad blogger lately. With the kids home, baseball, t-ball and summer camps I haven't had much time lately. I've also taken a couple of digital scrapbooking courses. Its so much fun. I'm just getting into it and trying to figure out Photoshop Elements.

This year I wanted to make a plan for my kids for summer. A calendar of activities and ideas of things to do so the summer didn't just fly by.

Some of the things could be reading, our library has a summer reading program. Workbooks so my kids don't forget during the summer months.

I also wanted to include cooking days, activity days, field trips (inexpensive ones), craft days, etc.

Well I haven't done it yet. I wish I could find a website that would have something already done that I could just vamp to my family. I found a couple that have some ideas. Here's one Chocolate On My CraniumNow I just need to incorporate it.

Do you make plans for the summer months or do you just let it fly by? I don't like to be all scheduled, I like some spontaneity so I can go do something with friends or family if needed. But I also want some scheduling some sort of plan.

Pumpkin growing contest

My dad, brothers and I are having a giant pumpkin growing contest this year for fun. This is the first year that all of us have a place to grow a garden. My older brother is a pretty avid gardner. He loves it, he's good at it and he has a good, warm, longer growing season too.

My youngest brother is pretty good at it too. This will be my other brothers first year with his garden. I've grown pumpkins but not giant pumpkins. So we'll see how it turns out.

Last year I had a beautiful hubbard squash plant. It was dead in a day. Squash bugs got it. So I'll need to be careful to watch my pumpkin plants.

I planted some seeds back in March. I finally got them in the ground a couple of weeks ago. So we will see how they turn out. My dad probably has the shortest growing season. Late and early frost but I think he has a few tricks up his sleeve (so I've heard) to get his going and growing.

Wish me luck and we'll see how big they turn out.