Summer Bucket List

It's officially May. It's time to start thinking about summer fun! And if you're like me, you have almost every weekend planned for your summer already.

Every year, we like to make a list of things we want to do during the summer. That being said, we don't always do everything on the list. We just try to do as many things as we can! It helps us make the summer fun and keeps us from getting bored. And since school ends in just a couple weeks (about 3 for us!), I thought now would be a good time to make our list! Scroll through the list to see if there's anything you might want to add to your summer bucket list!

30 Items to Put On Your Summer Bucket List This Year:

1. See a Drive-In Movie
2. Have a Water Balloon Fight
3. Go play Mini Golf
4. Swim in the Pool
5. The Beach
6. Visit Family
7. Slip & Slide
8. Backyard Camping
9. Make S'mores
10. Go hiking
11. Go for a paddleboat ride
12. Wash the car
13. Go Bowling
14. Go to the Farmer's Market
15. Go on a roadtrip
16. Watch fireworks
17. Take a train ride
18. Make homemade popsicles
19. Go to a baseball game
20. Visit a carnival
21. Go to the zoo
22. Visit the children's museum
23. Go fishing
24. Walk through botanical gardens
25. Go to some horse races
26. Go to an art's festival
27. Visit an amusement park
28. Have a photoshoot
29. Make cookies
30. Go to a kids building workshop

I really hope that your summer is awesome! Just like I'm sure that ours is going to be. I'll let you know at the end of the summer how many of these things we ended up doing!

25 Days of Christmas: Day 1

I absolutely LOVE Christmas! It's my favorite time of year! I don't just love Christmas. I love everything that goes along with Christmas. I love the candy, all the sweets, in fact, the decorations, the crafts, the music, the cheer, the joy, and all the excitement. I have already decorated my entire house! It's one of my favorite things. (My least favorite thing is cleaning my entire house before I put up all the decorations.)

So now that we have my intense love for everything Christmas established, let's get started. I have decided to go all out for my 5yo son this year. We have everything. I have planned at least 1 activity for every day leading up to Christmas. We also have our little elf on the shelf. Each day, I will post what we did that day and what our little elf did that night.

Day 1: Homemade ornament
I bought this ornament at Joann's Fabric for $0.99 (plus a coupon for 25% off my total purchase). Very cheap.

First we painted the whole thing blue. That went fairly smooth. The only bad part was waiting for everything to dry.

Then came the fun part! I painted my son's 3 fingers white and then pressed them down onto our ornament. We also added some white dots while we had the paint out to look like snow. I also painted a white hump at the bottom to look like a hill. And then, of course, we had to wait for this to dry too.

After everything was dry, we took our markers and decorated the snowmen. They of course needed hats, arms, buttons, carrot noses, scarfs, etc.

We put our names and the year on the back to remember this fun craft.

The last things to do were add a string and then hang it on the Christmas tree!

Wasn't that fun? We had a blast.

We also ended up going to Hy-Vee where there was a tree lighting countdown and then visits with Santa, reindeer, hot cocoa and cookies! It was so much fun!

Elf on the Shelf: Day 1 - Arrival Day
Since today was arrival day, our elf decided to bring Owen a letter from himself and from Santa. He even stuck it in the mailbox.