A weekly list of things accomplished, enjoyed, learned, tried and remembered.
1.Messenger Kids. So, our boys are both now officially middle schoolers (sob!). With them getting bigger, they are most definitely wanting bigger (and much more expensive) things, more responsibility, and….technology. We are holding off on getting them their own phones for several reasons, but mostly because it’s not necessary at this point. Since I’m a stay at home Momma–and I am at their beck and call–there’s really no need. BUT, I’ve noticed that there has been an increasing desire–especially for Morgan– to connect with his friends more and more. With the sudden switch to online school and then summer break–he didn’t get much of a chance to talk to his friends for several months. Enter Facebook Messenger for Kids. This app is ideal for us nervous nelly parents that want our kids to be able to connect with their friends, but not have to deal with all the responsibility that phone ownership entails just yet. Basically, you download the app and it connects to the parents’ existing Facebook Messenger account (the kids don’t have access to the parent messages-it’s just so the kids messenger will work). Your child is then given a code they can share with friends so that they can message each other, text silly gifs, and even live chat. I get the notification on my phone each time his friends are sending messages and I can just turn my phone over to him for a few minutes so he can message back. I like that it’s very secure and I get to approve who he sends his code to and also monitor his conversations which–to be quite honest– are goofy and absolutely ridiculous.
2.Garage sales. I love sharing with you some “normal” summer type activities that are still going on during this never ending pandemic. One of my all time favorites is–garage sales. I was SO excited back in May when I saw the first trail of signs in our neighborhood. This is something we do every year and it is so much fun to get new to us “treasures” each week. Since we’ve had several months of nothing to do but clean out closets –we even continued our tradition of having our own successful sale. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post on hosting your own successful sale–you can read that here.
3.Hank the Cowdog. With libraries closed down for several weeks and a required summer reading log to complete–my boys were getting pretty bored reading their same ole books over and over again. I was looking for some inspiration on a fun series for us to read together and remembered the Hank the Cowdog books. They are wonderful stories about a dog named Hank who “runs” a ranch with him sharing all of his adventures and mystery solving. The characters are wonderfully funny and the stories are awesome. There are 69 books total and we just started the first one: The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog. They’re only about 12 or so chapters each and have some cute sketches of various scenes throughout. My boys have LOVED it so far and now that the libraries are open for checking out books–we’ll be continuing the series.
4. Yard work. One of the not so fun parts of summer for me is yard work. We are in the midst of re-imagining our backyard. Part of that re-imagining included the need to remove some old mulch and a stump from a tree we had to take down this past fall (you can read about that sadness here). Thankfully, my Dad loaned us his chainsaw to help make the stump removal a little easier. I’m not sure “easy” would be a word Super Rockstar would associate with this project, but I think he secretly enjoyed using a chainsaw. I kind of expected to see him sporting a “Jason” mask and terrorizing our boys–but alas he stuck to his project and got er done. He named the beastly stump “the devils heart”–kind of a clue as to how he felt about the whole thing.
5. Movies we watched. We are a family that LOVES series movies and this past week we watched three of the four Indiana Jones films: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade. We loved them all. We did have to skip a couple of the more intense–kind of gruesome scenes, but my boys enjoyed them a lot. I’m not sure we’ll watch the 4th one (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)–I thought it was pretty terrible the first time I saw it (it has a very bizarre storyline) but, who knows? Maybe, I it’ll seem better this time.
6. My favorite memes of the week.
As always, I would love to hear from you. I hope you have a great week!
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