Home Again, Home Again

We've been on vacation this week...back to the same camp where we went in April, except we stayed longer this time. I had a wonderful mother's day, visiting our mothers and then going on to the camp.

About once or twice a year we like to go on a "resting vacation". This is a vacation where my husband can rest from his stressful job and we can be together and basically do nothing for a few days. We rent a house so we can cook most of our meals and we usually need to do a few loads of laundry, too.

We've come up with a couple of things that work well for our family and make the vacation more enjoyable for everyone.

First of all, I assign one helper per day. Since there are so many of us, everyone gets only one day assigned to them to be my helper. Everyone has to keep his or her "nest" fairly straight, wherever they are sleeping and keeping their things. The helper for the day helps me to prepare and clean up all three meals and helps me pick up in the house and helps tidy up bathrooms. If we're doing laundry that day, my helper pitches in with that chore, too. Then that helper is off the rest of the vacation. This idea gives the kids some vacation days, too, away from their usual daily chores.

This week I did something new, which worked very well. The weather was supposed to be rainy so I knew we would be in the house a lot. We all took plenty of books and toys for the 2 youngest, plus some card games. I asked 6 people (including me) to plan an activity for one afternoon or evening this week.

• Katie had water balloons and Dutch Blitz and Phase 10. It was hot yesterday, so they were able to play with the hose and the water balloons after all!
• Rachel had a wonderful nature walk planned. She divided us into teams of 2 and gave each team a card with 10 specific things (Abby's things were general, like a squirrel) to look for on the walk. We took along a nature handbook (whew! it was hard!) and gave prizes to the team who found the most things on their list (Yea, Daddy, Carrie, and Anna!).
• Emily made a charades game with two levels. The green slips of paper had words to act out, like doctor or hoeing. The yellow slips had titles of books, TV shows, movies, and songs. The lower level was for Abby, but everyone enjoyed acting these out, too.
  
• Carrie's activity lasted for several hours (thanks to Carrie, I left Abby and Thomas in her capable hands and I read a book!). We had gotten Mouse Cookies and More: A Treasury book from the library. It contains all the Laura Numeroff books and activities to go with each one. Thomas and Abby drew a picture of the family, wrote letters, did a word search, made a storybook, made sock puppets and painted and baked cookies (actually everyone had some dough).
  
• Anna made playdough for Abby and she made up a Mad Libs game.
• For mine, the younger kids made goop and the olders made seashell candles.

We had a great time!