Road Trip Mini-Vacation

Last week was our annual trip to Pennsylvania to visit my family.  I say “visit” because a trip to see family isn’t really a vacation.  There are always a ton of people to see, naps to be missed, and bedtimes that slip.  By the end of the week, I’ve found that our tempers are short and we need a vacation from our trip.  Hoping to avoid that this year, we decided to take a mini-vacation during our visit.  We packed up the boys and headed to Niagara Falls, Ontario, for an overnight stay.

It’s less than two hours from where I grew up to the Falls, so I’ve been there many times.  One thing I never got to experience growing up was staying in a hotel that overlooks the Falls.  I thought it might be too expensive for our budget this time, too, but I searched the internet and was pleasantly surprised by the number of affordable packages right now.  We decided to go with the Family Fun package at the Hilton Fallsview.  It included the room, but also a voucher for $40 to Macaroni Grill (the first in Ontario) and breakfast at their amazing buffet the next morning for all four of us.  Plus, the Hilton has an indoor pool with a great water slide!

I can’t say enough about how wonderful our experience at this hotel was.  The staff were all genuinely friendly and knowledgeable and the facilities were first rate.  Chris, the gentleman that handled our check-in, even accommodated Alex’s request for a room as high up in the tower as possible.  We were on the 42nd floor, which made both Alex and Declan very happy.  Here are some views from our room:

The view at night is just as spectacular, but I wasn’t able to get any really good shots without a tripod.  They light up the water at night with different colored lights and it’s beautiful!  There are also fireworks displays on several nights and, in July and August, they do fireworks every Wednesday as well.

It was uncharacteristically hot the day we were there, so we didn’t do as many outside activities as we thought we might.  The room and facilities were well-suited for this, though.  We had two bedrooms, each with its own television.  There was also a fireplace in the room, but we decided against trying it out, even though the boys were VERY interested.  We spent a lot of time in the pool and I think my husband and Alex went down that water slide about 30 times.  Alex described the hotel as luxurious and I would have to agree.  The beds were so comfortable and the pillows were nice and fluffy.  We were sad to leave after only one night, but it was a great experience.  If you are planning a trip to Niagara Falls, I highly recommend the Hilton Fallsview!

“Are we there yet?”

We are preparing for our summer road trip to Pennsylvania.  Google Maps suggests that it should take 13 hours, but we find that it varies between 14 and 16 hours.  It all depends on how restless the boys get.  Or maybe how many Chipotle restaurant stops we make.  It’s definitely one of the two.

One thing I’ve learned in the seven years we’ve been doing this (at least twice a year), is that the boys need to be distracted or things go downhill very quickly.  We allow them to watch movies and play on various gaming devices, but I really prefer that they do something that requires them to use their minds.

I was really excited when I found this Travel Bingo game the other day at Growing Tree Toys.  Alex will really get into the hunting and finding (and winning) aspect of it, while Declan will likely just make circles all over the bingo card.  Either way, they will both be engaging their brains and I will happy!

Does your family make long road trips?  How do you keep your kids from “are we there yet??” only 3 hours into the long journey?

Testing the Tooth Fairy

Alex lost his first tooth in February of this year.  It had been hanging on by a thread for nearly a week before we convinced him to let us help things along.  When the excitement was over, I thought for sure he would run right upstairs and put the tooth under his pillow, but he asked for a sandwich bag instead.  He put the tooth in the bag and put the bag away in the junk drawer in the kitchen.  I asked him what his plans were for the tooth and he said that he wanted to save it for a bit.  More teeth jumped ship and after two months, we had a collection 5 teeth in the drawer.

One afternoon, Alex announced that he was going to “test” the tooth fairy that night.  He planned to place one of his saved teeth under his pillow to see if she would notice.  If his test was successful, he planned to place the rest of the teeth under his pillow the next night for “the big payout.”  I honestly don’t know where he comes up with this stuff.  So, bedtime came that night and it was one of the quickest and easiest bedtimes ever – go figure.  When he woke the next morning, the tooth was gone and there was money in its place.  Success!

Alex disappeared for a bit and came back with two notes to show me.  The first was a map for the tooth fairy.  That night was the big payout and he wanted to be sure she knew where to find those teeth.  He also clearly stated his expectations for the exchange.  You can see below that “I need $15.”  Uh-huh.

In his next note, Alex left the instructions on where to place the money.  He also tried to pump the tooth fairy for information.  The note says, “Also, does one tooth equal $5?  I won’t tell.”  She didn’t answer him that night, but she did exchange the teeth for some more money.

The first tooth of the next wave came out the other night at dinner.  I’m anxiously waiting to see how this round with the tooth fairy will go.  Does your family have any special tooth fairy celebrations?

Water fun (and a parenting question)

It was hot this weekend.  It’s always hot in Alabama in the summer, but this weekend brought us temperatures in the mid-90s and a heat index of 105 degrees.  We don’t usually see that until mid-July, after we’ve had a chance to build up a bit of a heat tolerance.  Since we were already at Bridge Street, we let the boys have a little fun in the fountain park they have there.  It was pretty crowded, but the boys both had some fun.

I really try to let them just do their thing, but I find myself on a constant repeat of “don’t run, walk please, please don’t run” as they move from fountain to fountain.  I saw several kids slip on the concrete and fall while we were there.  None of them were hurt, thankfully, but I wonder if there might be some kind of non-slip padding or texture that could be added to this area.

We had a little trouble with getting Alex to follow rules while we were there.  Children are supposed to wear shoes and, as you can see in the photo above, not everyone does.  Alex didn’t have a problem with that one, but we also asked him not to put his foot over the hole where the water comes out.  There were so many children there that it was hard for them all to have access to the water and covering it up made it not fun for some children.  We asked Alex to be considerate of the other (smaller) children and have fun in other ways.  He did this at first, but when other kids his age started covering up the water spray and their parents didn’t do anything about it, he thought he should be able to do it, too.  We explained again that he needed to be considerate of the other kids, but he was hot and tired and it quickly turned into “but that’s not fair!”

We hear “that’s not fair” a lot around here.  Often, that just means Alex doesn’t like something we’ve said, but sometimes he’s right.  How do you handle things when friends of your children have rules at their homes that are significantly different than the ones at your house?  We’ve had some incidents in our neighborhood recently that have shown us that not all of the parents in our neighborhood are on the same page with what appropriate behavior is and I wonder if any of you have faced the same thing and how you handled it.  Share your thoughts and experiences, please!

Fun with Fruits and Veggies!

Several weeks ago, a new Earth Fare store opened in our city.  If you aren’t familiar with Earth Fare, they are the healthy supermarket.  My family was SO excited when we heard they would be opening here!  We try hard to make smart choices with our shopping, but it’s sometimes difficult given our limited choices at the more traditional grocery stores we have.  Earth Fare makes it very easy for me to pick the healthy option.  They won’t even sell products in their stores that contain trans fats or high fructose corn syrup!  (You can check out their food philosophy here to see the other ingredients/processes they will not sell.)  So, on the rare occasion (ha!) when my children are hanging like monkeys from the shopping cart and I’m  just grabbing what I can from the shelves, I can be assured that my purchases might not match my list, but they will be healthy.  Anyway…even before the store was open, Earth Fare partnered with Bridge Street (our local outdoor shopping area) for an Earth Day celebration.  They had children at the event sign pieces of iron that would later be turned into a sculpture that was specially commissioned by Earth Fare.  The unveiling of the sculpture was this weekend and we were there!

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the petals all have the signatures of children who were at the Earth Day event.  As part of the unveiling festivities, Earth Fare had a fruit and veggie face making contest.  Alex was very excited and spent a great deal of time picking out just the right features for his face.

While Alex worked hard on his face, Declan was VERY excited by the seed-planting station they had set up.  I’m sure the original intent was to actually plant seeds, but Declan much preferred to push the wheelbarrows around.

Alex eventually finished his face and submitted it for the contest.  You might be able to see some of his “specialty features” in the photo below:  mushroom eyebrows, tomato eyes, and tomato feet.  He didn’t win, but he was very proud of it and so were we!  We hung around Bridge Street for a bit after the judging for some fountain park fun.  I’ll share some of those photos tomorrow!

Summer Reading

Summer is in full swing around here, but the last several days have seen off and on rain and storms.  The boys have been disappointed that they couldn’t go outside, but we used some of the rain delays to get a start on our summer reading.  We read a lot normally, but the incentive programs provided by many bookstores give an added element of fun.  Who doesn’t love free books??  We’re participating in the Barnes and Noble Summer Reading Program, which requires Alex to read eight books in order to choose one free book.  He’s a pretty fast reader and is already halfway there!  Barnes and Noble also provides a lot of great downloadable activities to go along with the program.  Some of his favorites are the Geronimo Stilton books and the Magic Tree House series.

If your kids also enjoy the Magic Tree House series, you will want to check out the Magic Tree House website, where they have an entire Passport to Adventure planned this summer.  You can print out a passport for your child and earn stamps for each book.  You can even enter to win a Magic Tree House for your own backyard!

What books are on your child’s summer reading list this year?

The Sewing Room

When we moved into our current house, we “named” some of the rooms by their purpose. One room downstairs, that was designed as a formal dining room, became the Music and Sewing room. Music is my husband’s thing and sewing is mine. In the autumn, my husband generously offered to relocate his music gear to the office area upstairs so I could have the entire sewing room and dedicate it to my hobby. He also suggested that we renovate the room (paint and minor furnishings only, nothing structural!) to make it more functional. I was all for it – how do you say no to something like that?!

We prepped and painted the walls and then made the 4 hour trek to IKEA for some Billy bookcases, a desk that would serve as the sewing table, and a great entertainment center/bench that would work for us as a window seat. Once we got it all home, we decided that if we were going to start this thing, we needed to do it the right way. So, we ripped out the existing carpet and Rod installed a new hardwood floor. It all turned out to be a much larger (and more expensive) project than we planned on, but we found some great deals along the way that made it not so bad. My sewing room looked great!

Then, not even a week later, things reached a breaking point with Alex and his school situation. We made the decision to pull him out of his current school and bring him home to do homeschool. Sewing room out, school room in.

[EDIT: There are supposed to be photos of the before and after and sewing to school transformation, which help this post make more sense. I can't figure out how to load them, so I'll get those added when I have some technical assistance...]

Happy New Year!

Stating the obvious, I’m quite a bit late on that.  One of my goals for 2009 was to update this space more frequently.  I don’t want to set some unrealistic expectations for myself, but I do want to make more of an effort here.  And, seeing that the last post was from July (!), I don’t think I can do much worse than 2008.

I’m having some technical issues with posting photos at the moment, so I’ll leave you (hopefully) with a fun video from our Thanksgiving holiday in Pennsylvania.

Meet Declan

I’m almost a month late in posting this, but I hope you’ll forgive me. I have a good excuse. Here he is.

This is Declan Thomas, born January 28th. Life has been an adjustment since then, but the real reason I haven’t posted is that I can’t seem to get a good photo of the new boy! He has a head full of strawberry blonde/red hair and the natural light to really highlight that has been scarce in these parts lately – or at least during the hours that I have two free hands…

We are all doing well here. It started off a bit rocky, what with Declan losing “too much” weight during his first week, but that has more than reversed itself and we now find ourselves needing to purchase the full size bottles because the small ones just don’t hold enough for each feeding. I’m very curious to see how much he weighs at our next visit to the pediatrician. We also had the pleasure of dealing with the worst stomach virus to hit our house in the last seven years exactly 2 days after we brought Declan home. One week after that, Alex came home from school with pink eye. Needless to say, it was a fun few weeks. Thankfully, things seem to have settled down and everyone has been healthy for a couple of weeks now.

Big brother Alex has been an incredible help. I was a little worried about how things would go down when Alex realized that Declan is here to stay, but he has been great. He wants to help with diapers, pacifiers, picking out clothes – all of it. Alex reads stories to Declan, teaches him math, and sings lullabies to him when he cries in the car. I underestimated the love that a 5 year old could have for a baby. Here’s some photographic proof – just look at the love in his eyes!

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Exhale

So the Christmas festivities have ended…finally. It feels like we’ve been “doing Christmas” since mid-November, which I guess we really have. It’s nice to be able to relax and exhale a bit – at least for a moment. I know there will be all kinds of excitement to come in the next several weeks as we await the arrival of the new boy, but for now I’m enjoying just sitting in this comfy chair and looking at the mess that needs to be put away…

Here are Rod and Alex enjoying a laugh earlier this week. That boy just will not smile a “real” smile if there is a camera around. Anyone else have that problem?

Finally, earlier today there was an attack at Playmobil International Airport. It seems that the pirates from Skull Island really wanted to get on a plane bound for Tokyo, but they didn’t have proper identification. They used various canons and shooters, according to Alex, and were finally allowed to board the flight. As you can see below, peace has been restored. It’s a good day.

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