Parks

Time travel into the past: July 2017

/ Franci / Leave a comment

Life’s been happening by the spade full around here, and blogging has been severely neglected, sorry. Here’s an attempt at rectifying that!

Back in July last year… hmmm, let’s see if the photos can remind me that far back!

There was the joy of growing veggies in the backyard,

IMG_20170627_094726102IMG_20170627_094747088 a great visit from Ben’s dad and a picnic table built by him and Ben,

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and many pool days, including a fun 4th of July celebration at my friend Kelly’s house that involved a crazy greased watermelon game. It’s kind of like rugby but with a watermelon slickly greased with Crisco, and in the water!

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Marica went off to a 5-night sleep-over summer camp with her friend Willow, and loved it,

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and while Marica was at camp and Laurelin at preschool, I took Esther for a fun mom and daughter pedicure, which was a real nice treat!

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There were also plenty of park days,

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beautiful sunsets,

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a fun picnic with a sister church out on Long Island,

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and plenty of hilarity — that is dirt she sat in outside while playing with mud, not poop, I promise! Why my kids seem to think that playing with dirt in white clothing is okay is beyond me. See also the crazy sister in the background about to do a roly-poly on the tile floor. Did I mention hilarity? :-)

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Roadtrip ’16: Six Flags

/ Franci / 2 Comments

For the last leg of our roadtrip home, we made a stop at Six Flags in the south of New Jersey. They have a program called Read To Succeed where the kids have to read a total of 600 hours in the year to get free tickets to Six Flags. Just kidding, not 600. Not even 60… SIX. Yes, for a mere 6 hours of reading the kids (and their teacher!) could get free entry to the park. I made them do those 6 hours as out loud reading because heck, they read more than 6 hours in a week!

It was a beautiful but HOT day. We split up according to our abilities to handle thrill — Ben and Marica went off and hit the crazy roller coasters, while I did the tame kiddie rides with the two little ones. Our most exciting ride was the Log Flume, and that was about as much as I can handle. I’m such a wuss!

Esther, Laurelin and I took a sort of animal safari tour (so gimmicky, but then it’s an amusement park, isn’t it?) and got to see many interesting animals.

After lunch we were disappointed to find out that all the tall rides had been closed because there was a thunderstorm within 30 miles (dumb protocols) and so we hung around a bit doing not much — you know, eating funnel cake, looking at people on stilts and attempting to do an inside ride that ended up way too scary for the kids — and were about to leave when we found out the rides had been opened again. That was nice, because that’s when I got my chance on that Log Flume Ride of Death, ha. We were glad the high rides opened because we wanted to finish off the day with a cable car ride, which we got to do. It was neat to see the park from the air!

And then it was time for dinner, which we decided to have outside the park to not pay through our noses for blah food. We went to Cracker Barrel, where we paid next to nothing for blah food.

On the way home we spotted an alien space ship cloud over Newark airport. They’re coming to get us!

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Homeschool field trip

/ Franci / 6 Comments

One weekend in May we took the girls in to the Ancient Egyptian section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because in our history program we’d been studying Ancient Egypt. It was great to see many of the things we (including myself!) had been learning about in real life, and the girls seemed to really enjoy it.

Seeing that the Met is right in Central Park, we spent some time there afterward until the rain started coming down.

A fun and informative Saturday morning, despite the rain!

Camping in the wilds of New Jersey

/ Franci / 3 Comments

The first weekend in September we went camping with Lillian and Jeremy and Shanna at High Point State Park. We didn’t really know what to expect, seeing that we had never been there before, but we were up for trying it — our very first camping trip in the U.S.! Ben took the Friday off work and we were at the campgrounds by lunchtime, which was great to set up camp and all that. What wasn’t so great was that it was predicted to rain all that weekend. We weren’t going to be deterred!

We were right next to a lake. There was the little misunderstanding about how I thought the lake in the photos would be the same one we’d be camping next to, but that was a little further up the road, a bit cleaner and swim-able. The one we were next to was definitely not a swimming lake. It was pretty, though!

It was a wonderfully relaxing weekend. I was so ready to get out of the city! It was wonderful to enjoy nature, enjoy Jeremy and Lillian’s company, enjoy camping food (barbecued meat! potato salad! marshmallows!), and to smell like sweat, smoke and insect repellent (yeah, I’m weird. I kinda like that smell. For a couple of days, anyway!).

We went for a walk around the lake. It was a very pretty walk, and we also got to see all sorts of interesting flowers and critters!

We were so blessed that the rain that was predicted to be drizzling all day really only came after dinner on Saturday night. We even got to make stick bread, one of my favourite childhood Voortrekker (scout) camping memories — bread shaped on the end of a stick, roasted over the fire. Like a marshmallow, only longer. :-) I was having so much fun, I neglected to take a photo of it, which is a shame. Well, when the rain came, it really came down something fierce. I think two storms passed over us during the night, but we were all nice and snug in the tents, and in the morning the sun rose brightly and dried off our tent in time for us to pack it up!

We did get to spend some time at the lake in the photos too where the water in the taps were also a little less brown than at the pump by our campsite, so we filled up our bottles there. On the day we left just Ben and the kids and I went back and there was some sort of community event that let people use kayaks and canoes for free. I stayed on the sidelines with a tired Laurelin, and Ben and the two older girls enjoyed the free kayaks.

We all got home very tired, but it was a good kind of tired.