Planning Time!

My grandchildren range in age from age 2 to age 17. Although all are invited to participate in camp, not all choose or are able to attend. To keep the older kids involved, I ask them to be my assistant beginning at age 12. I now have 4 elligible assistants with the addition of Addie this year! Rumor has it that she has a notebook full of great ideas!
Early in the spring and sometimes later, I get my assistants together to help me plan camp. This is usually a sleep over event. Once the theme for the year is decided upon (a task of trying to mesh girl ideas and boy preferences!), we outline the schedule. We get a design for the invitations, decide on a menu, craft, and field trip.
This is never a set in stone plan. There are alot changes that can mess with our grand plan! We have to be careful to plan around our active families lives. Sometimes I have to remind them of my budget guidlines and how long activities may take. My assistants are invaluable! They know what their younger siblings like and what they will and will not eat.
We do as much assembling of craft supplies and any decorations that may be necessary as we can. I hope that my assistants feel as important as they are!

Bowling Tournament

Why not host a Grandma Camp celebrating the interests or hobbies of those who have passed on. Each year we host a bowling tournament to honor my father and my husbands father.

There are traveling trophies (bowling pins, with the winners name and score) awarded for different age levels and catagories.

The bowling ball and pin clock is for the high series of all age groups. There is even a trophy for trick shot!

We have a pot-luck lunch of sandwiches, soup and salad. While everyone takes turns, the children watch a movie in another room or play in the toy room. It would be easy to turn this event into an overnight "camp". Invitations would of corse be the shape of a bowling pin. Breakfast of bowling ball pancakes is easy! A few drops of jam on the cooked pancake for the finger and thumb holes! You could give a short history of the deceased person you are honoring. The night before, the children could bowl with plastic pop bottles and a dollar store ball.
I am sure this could be a Beat the Winter Blahs Camp with a little planning and imagination!

HALLOWEEN

Every year at a Sunday dinner close to Halloween, I serve something that is a little ghoulish. This year I had the kids make their own alien cupcakes. The hair (or arms) are chow mien noodles and the eyes are M&M's attached with a dab of frosting.

 

 

Last year we had road kill meatloaf with mashed potato ghosts.
The year before, spaghetti  and salad served in a mummy. The breadsticks were the femer bones and the salad dressing and parmesan were in the gloves which had to be pulled off to serve!

Honeydew mellon "brain"

Dinner served out of a mummy

Not too sure they wanted dinner!

Space Camp 2011

Flying saucer treats

Constructing the shuttle

Budget cuts and the heat made simple suits a must!

The Alien (aka Grandpa) offering krypton (home made slime) to power the shuttle back up.

Lunch(ables) in the shuttle

Emergency shute! Cardboard covered stairs and a cot cushion were a highlight.

weightlessness training

Shuttle races (note protective eyewear) with the children's hot air for the power supply.

We had so much fun this year! We went into space after building our own shuttle (named "RESCUE"). We gathered soil samples from the moon (moon sand), rescued rangers from an asteroid field, and met an alien (Grandpa) who gave us slime to fuel our ship. We also made our own patches, shot off rockets, raced mini shuttles, and the food was everything from a pouch. We even had Tang!

Book sales so far

I love to read everyone else's blogs but I am obviously not into blogging myself! Here's a little catch-up:

I have had a second batch of books to sell. I have done a Relief Socoety demo in a ward across town and received some very fun ideas from the women who attended and they were very fun to spend an evening with. I had been very nervous and had prepared for week in advance. My display was fairly extensive, but generated a lot of intrest.

On June 4th I will be doing a 2 hour class at the Utah County Women in the Outdoors gathering. I am worried as to how I will fill a 2 hour span of time, but since I will be talking about something I enjoy and the children I love, it should be okay. I am sure that I will get a lot of great ideas also.

This is a picture of the grands and my daughters doing a very time consuming but adorable craft from Safari Camp. They are making jungle animals using water bottles and tissue with a few embelishments. I was soooo glad the girls could stay to help!

Family Pictures 12/18/2010

We had family pictures taken as part of the anual Christmas Party. This is by far the best gift I could receive! It was cold, but all were present and cooperative most of the time.

I did it! I just printed my book Grandma Camp On A Budget. It turned out great! At least my children will have a legacy of me and know that I enjoy the times we have together. I just took it to a local printer for printing and binding. I am trying to sell the 25 copies I ordered and then maybe self-publish. This is a test to see if it is a good idea to self publish, I am not going to lay out a few hundred dollars to self-publish and then find no return.
I was able to cross this off my "bucket list".
What will you do this year to accomplish a goal?
I don't want to leave a mess for our children, so we are doing wills and organizing the paperwork that is important into a "family info" binder. Each of my children have been given one of their own binders to fill out as well as a copy of the location of the important documents of ours that they may need in case of death or emergency.
Hey, that's 2 things off my bucket list!