Cleaning out 60 years

Over the last year, my family has helped my father clean out my grandparent's home. They didn't pass away, but they did need to be moved into assisted living. As they are now in their 90's, their health had taken a turn for the worse, and they needed more help then just themselves at home. So that left a packed home that my dad was trying to clean out on his own, while still working a very full time job. We took 2 full days over the course of a month last spring and just tackled the majority of the house. Because they lived through the Depression, they felt the need to keep pretty much everything, "you never know when you might need it". There was much of it that was just trash, like the cooler cardboard box that the holiday ham or turkey came in for every holiday from the company my grandfather retired from. No joke, every. single. box.  Or every peanut butter jar plastic lid for who knows how many years. But all of that had to be sorted and thrown away. To make the job even harder, we needed to go through every pocket, drawer, stack of stuff, because we would find money, or important papers just stashed in all of them. But overall, we found some very neat things. 

In the basement was a tiny little bathroom, one of which I had absolutely no memory of. The medicine cabinet looked like it had not been touched since the 70's.

I found the original house key. 

This was a small figurine that my dad had won at a Halloween costume contest. I thought it was interesting, but even more so when I flipped it over and saw the "occupied Japan" marking. 

Company seals from 2 of the companies my grandfather did work for. 

A silly poster of my grandfather from a company party. It was just too funny to not take a picture of. 

When I would go to my grandparent's house as a grade schooler, there wasn't much to play with. But one day my brother and I discovered this game in the basement and played it many many times. It needed to come home with me. 

In fact we discovered many many old games that were very interesting. We now have a bag of them to go through and decide if we will play them or sell them and give the money to my grandparents. 

Spring Break 2016

Our spring break this year had horrible weather sadly, so we had to alter our plans. We spent every weekday of break with our best friends.

Monday: Learn how to Geocache! If you haven't given this a shot, I highly suggest you do! While using GPS coordinates you find little hidden treasures. The kids had a blast and we ended up finding 7 around town.

Tuesday: Imagination Station in Toledo Ohio!

Wednesday: Bowling!!!! Our local place was running a special. For $25 6 people got shoes, 2 hours of bowling, a large pizza, and a pitcher of lemonade.

We then made a frozen yogurt stop at the local Sweet Frog!

Then our last stop for the day, the local library! They set up a bunch of life size games to play. We loved playing kerplunk and Candy Land.

Thursday: Curious Kid's Museum in St. Joe Michigan

Friday: The AG days fair! Our local 4h likes to put on a fair where kids can come and meet the animals and farms for free. We have gone every year since L was in kindergarten.

Sugar Camp Days 2016

I'm not sure how this didn't get posted a month ago, but here it goes.

We really enjoyed going to the Sugar Camp Days last year, and when I won a free pass from the local radio station, we needed to go again!

We always love seeing what sculptures they make out of ice.

And of course D wanted to take a ride on the horse drawn wagon, she even got the top spot up by the driver.

The guys opted to walk along side the wagon.

Got to check out how the pioneers gathered the maple sap to turn into maple syrup.

My intrepid tree climbers.

L was super nervous to do this again, but braved it anyway and got higher this year than last.

D stopped halfway up to have a good swing before climbing all the rest of the way up.

We then headed in for crafts and some maple cotton candy, the best!

2016 World Thinking Day for Brownies

In Girl Scouts we all celebrate World Thinking Day on Feb. 22 every year. This is a way that Girl Scouts/Guides all over the world can feel connected. With this being our troops first year, we decided to skip our council's awesome party to celebrate, and opted to have a smaller party with just our Brownies. A few weeks prior we had the girls vote on 3 countries to learn about, and they picked Mexico, Ireland, and Germany. So I printed out these great little passport pages about each country for each girl, found neat rainbow books in the Dollar Spot at Target, planned a craft/activity for each, and had a food from each country.

We started our journey on the globe and headed to Ireland!

The passport in the rainbow book.

The girls made shamrock wands by gluing a foam glittery shamrock from the dollar store to a green colored popsicle stick. To snack on, I found these malted candies, and an Irish cheese for the girls to try.

Next stop was Mexico! The girls made maracas out of plastic Easter eggs, rice, and 2 plastic spoons duct taped to the sides of the egg. Clearly all the girls had a blast making music when they were done.  They tried Arcoiris cookies and all loved it!

And our last stop was Germany!

The girls tried this fun German Chocolate bar.

I made each girl a German Schultüte, a traditional first day of school treat filled with new school supplies. 

The girls all had so much fun that they asked if I could do 1 country per month for the rest of the year.