Planning fun stuff

So we dropped two of our boys off at camp today.  This was a first for them!  I'm so excited for the fun experiences they will have to add to their memory banks :)  To make another "deposit" we stopped off on the way at a water fall and had a picnic.  Asides from the safety stress that is always there with little ones it was a lot of fun!

Filling up the memory banks with good memories...this is one of my goals for my boys!  One way I do this is to tack on fun stuff when we are doing something else whenever time permits.  We get more "bang for our travel buck" that way!  One helpful tool for this is Trip Advisor.  Whenever we are going somewhere I go to the Trip Advisor website and enter the city where we are going and select "things to do" and up pops lots of fun stuff to see and do in that city along with very helpful reviews!
Another great resource I use is a book called Kids Love Georgia.  A family wrote it after visiting 100's of fun museums, historical sites, national/state parks, etc., in Georgia.  They tell about each place, where it is, what its all about, etc.  This helps give me ideas for places to go.  Day trips are great and even one or two night trips.  The key is just planning ahead.  Before summer arrived I had the book pulled out and I had been thinking about what our summer would look like, what short trips I wanted to take and what our budget would allow, what our kids ages and stages would allow :)

One thing that we do is sometimes just one parent goes with some of the older kids.  This allows the older kids to experience things that we otherwise just wouldn't do with little ones or couldn't do with little ones.  This summer I have planned a day trip with my 10 and 13 year old to visit several historic Cherokee Nation sites....New Echota-their old capital city, Cherokee leader Chief Vann's House and Chieftains Museum in Rome, GA.  We are reading aloud several books about the Cherokee Nation in preparation for our trip.

What I'd really love to do is travel all over the United States seeing and learning but that my friends AIN'T gonna happen.  So I would much rather focus in on what's doable.  This year in particular we are going to clamp down on spending and try to be really frugal.  I'm so grateful for lots of memory making potential all around us here in Georgia.  Day trips---here we go!