Get Outdoors!
Apparently, today is National Get Outdoors Day. I only found out about it by accident, when I stumbled across A Magical Childhood’s blog, linked to from Peaceful Parenting,which I was reading for another post that will go up in the next few days on eco-consciousness – so look for that!
Anyhoo… we had a full day outdoors planned already, so I’m glad that we got to participate in the national event, even if it was only consciously for the afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, our Farmer’s Market is on Saturdays, and we’re trying to go every other week (which is when we grocery shop). This was the second time we’ve gotten to go, and the first time we’ve actually bought something. I found some absolutely gorgeous tomatoes, huge blackberries (big as my thumb!), lovely little blueberries, honey from local bees, bell peppers and onions. The kids were hot and hungry and whiney, as evidenced by their expressions:
so we were only there for about 45 minutes – I woke the kids up, dressed them and we were out the door sans breakfast, so we went through McDonalds (I know, I know – but it’s a rare indulgence) for McGriddles for the boys and to Chick Fil A for chickin-minis and coffee (that lovely, delicious, life-sustaining elixir of life – COFFEE!!) for me.
The market was just teeming with activity this morning. It was nice to be out and about so early. I’m typically not a morning person, but lately, I’ve come to respect (if not full-on ‘enjoy’) the early morning. I’ve been getting up when my husband leaves for work, so I’ve had some time – usually no more than half an hour or so - before the kids get up and it’s really nice to have the time to myself.
We had to wait a while between breakfast and the kids’ workshop at Lowe’s, so while the kids played, I revised our calendar for the next couple of months. Our Library’s Summer Reading Program has a ton of events and I didn’t realize that it would be the same presentation at multiple locations, so we double-booked on a couple. Then we headed over to the post office to mail off our first 5 PostCrossing postcards – to Greece, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Brazil. It’s a really neat site – you register and send out postcards to people all over the world, and then your name goes into the post and you get postcards from all over. You have the opportunity to contact each other after the postcard is received, so I would imagine that you could pick up an international pen-pal if you were so inclined. One of our postcard recipients has a daughter that is 8, so we’re going to send her a postcard as well. The optimist-homeschool-mom in me totally sees that playing out in a pen-pal sort of way, lol. Whether the boys will be interested in writing to her or not is probably a different matter! In any case, whatever postcards we get are going to be going up on a wall in our school room, and we’ll add a push-pin to a wall map to track the ones we send out in one color and the ones we get back in another color. I’m excited about it!
Once we got to Lowe’s, some friends of ours, LittleBoyBlue’s best friend from school and his mom and some of our homeschooling friends, came and met us to do the craft. The kids made a picture frame. This was by far the most complicated build we’ve had so far. Granted, this is only our third class, but still. They did a great job building them though, and had fun visiting with their friends. It’s been hard coordinating busy schedules to get the kids together lately; I’m really glad we had a chance to do that today.
After working with man-tools, we went over to Michael’s craft store for a more artsy Father’s Day themed craft – a hand-painted camouflage picture frame. I doubt that our dad will actually get the frame – he’s not really a picture frame kinda guy; but he will appreciate the craftsmanship and artistic allure of their work, I am sure. Michael’s also had a ceramic mug with markers that is actually the craft for tomorrow – we might just go back since they’ll be on sale for $1.50 – plus you get to keep the markers, which are permanent on anything ceramic. I can just see all kinds of uses for ceramic markers. It’s amazing how blank and plain all our white dishes are now in my mind {wink}.
Factor in a trip to the grocery store to re-stock the pantry for the next 2 weeks, and then we headed back home for a lunch of fresh fruit and veggies, sandwiches and I think the kids had ramen noodles. Not my favorite, but they do enjoy cooking “worms”, as they call them. It’s one of the few things that they can cook mostly by themselves. Now that I think about it, they probably could cook more. Maybe we’ll work on that in home-ec this coming week.
After catching up on this week’s Merlin, we changed clothes and headed out to the pool (after checking on our tomatoes, which are GROWING!!), where we spent the rest of the afternoon. My mom and my grandmother came out to swim with us, so we had a nice little visit with them – one of the perks of living next door to two sets of relatives, I think.
All in all, I’d say that today was well-spent. I hope your family was able to Get outdoors and enjoy some family-togetherness fun today!
Warmly,
~h
Farmer’s Market and Saturday Kid Crafting
This morning was the long-awaited opening day of our brand new local Farmer’s Market. I naturally set the tone for the morning by forgetting to set my alarm cock last night and was woken by the sound of the phone ringing – my SIL calling to see why we weren’t in the car yet…
{cue mad dash to the bathroom for morning face-washing, teeth-brushing, hair-combing and contact-inserting – then scrambling into clothes (Where are your SHOES?!?) and snag 3 cereal bars and bottles of water on our way out the door…. 15 minutes late.}
One of the things that I’m sad we missed was that a local amateur farmer (and coincidentally, our weatherman) was giving the first 50 kids who signed in a free tomato plant. We got there at 8:30 (maybe a little before that) and they were all gone. Boo for us, but YAY that there were so many people out there this morning!
In some areas, farmer’s markets, recycling, lots of people commuting by bike, people using ‘green’ shopping bags – these things are commonplace. Here, though, they’re not. Oh sure, our grocery stores all jumped on the “green bag” bandwagon a year or so ago (and I’ll admit to being one of the ones who started using them then), but most people don’t use them much anymore, and some stores’ cashiers get this odd, confused look on their face when you put your re-usable bags on the conveyor belt because they’re so unused to seeing them that they’re just not sure what they’re for (and forget trying to have them packed correctly {sigh}). Our area is so far behind in terms of environmental consciousness and green living that the fact that there’s a farmers market at all is rather astounding. That it was well-supported is nothing short of amazing – and good news because it means that there will be growth!
We actually didn’t buy anything this morning – they were sold out by 9AM of most of the veggies, and I wasn’t shopping for beef (grass-fed!) or jams or jellies (my SIL and I are talking about making our own…); we did get lots of info on gardening, signed the kids up for some summer stuff and in general, had a good time.
After that, we headed off to Lowe’s to their Kid’s Build and Grow Clinic so the kiddos could make a mini-catapult. I’ve seen these workshops before and we’ve been meaning to go, but never have. I’m so glad we went this time! It’s free and the kids get a little apron and they earn a cloth badge once they’ve made their craft. It’s all in a little kit and they have child-sized tools and everything. They were really proud of their work – and the catapults really work, too!
Our next stop was supposed to be Barnes & Noble to say goodbye to a friend of ours who is moving back to her home state, but we got distracted by a bounce-house outside of a locally owned school/office supply store. They were having a “Family Fun Day” for the kids to make tee shirts, masks, scrapbook albums, play games, have snacks and get their face painted. My crew played a game and grabbed some popcorn and cotton candy, but their focus was the bounce house so we streamlined our visit there and then headed off to wish our friends a safe trip home and let them know how much we’ll miss them. Luckily, they were running late, too, so even though we were a bit tardy, we didn’t get there much after she did.
Then it was home again, home again, jiggety-jig for a relaxing afternoon spent chillaxin’ with Daddy. That’s a Saturday well spent!
Warmly,
~h
