Keepin Busy

My wonderful husband started working full time again January 2011. It's been a long time coming and we are THRILLED to see full paychecks again. Hoorray!!! When he was hired on, he was hired for day shift, and then through a whole lot of HR drama, ended up being assigned to a third shift position. This has been quite the adjustment for our family! To add to the fun, he has his days (nights?) off during the week, so that means that he needs to SLEEP during the day on the weekend. No easy task when you have 3 very active children at home.

We have been filling our weekends with tons of fun activities, activities that are either free or very inexpensive for us to do.

So what have we done? A quick glance at my calendar shows:

• Saturday movies. There is a theater nearby where we can see first run movies in the morning very cheap. For the 4 of us to go and get popcorn and drinks it's only $15. There was also a free family movie festival of second run movies that we went to quite a few of. the kids loved it!










• Scout field trip to the TV station

• Camp Open Houses. The YMCA camp near us has held monthly open houses to recruit families for camp this summer. We knew we were going to register Nick and Nate for a week of camp, so we took the opportunity to attend both open houses. One time the weather was not that great and they didn't get to do everything they wanted, the second time they were able to do it all!
  


• Easter came and went with the chance to go to a few egg hunts and other church/community activities.
  
  
  



• Local (flower) nurseries have had season opening celebrations that had kid activities, food and fun

We've also been able to spend a few weekends almost completely outdoors. So nice to enjoy the good weather when we actually have it. The snow in April wasn't very welcome, but we made it through. Nate has really taken an interest in gardening this year, so we've also spent quite a bit of time scavenging for container garden supplies and plants. Because we live in a rural area and our yard is wide open, having a veggie garden in our yard would only be inviting critters in, so we decided to do our garden on our deck in containers.


I'm already filling up days on our calendar for the summer of activities we can't wait to do! The boys are registered for a week of daycamp while our daycare is closed, vacation Bible school, camping, a trip to Michigan Adventure, family reunions, family picnics, and some other community events sprinkled in there. the county park by us stopped charging admission, so we can go there to play on the beach and swim, or we can head over the Yankee Springs State Park and hit the beach there too!