Yesterday celebrated another Fourth of July Jubilee. While watching the parade, milling around before the fireworks, and enjoying the show, I realized I experience something unique every year. Small towns often bear the brunt of jokes or are put down, but there are some things small towns have that larger cities can’t touch.

Parade Memories

The Port Orford 4th of July parade is a constant in our family, and there have been very few times we’ve missed it, even if we did miss the fireworks. I shared photos of a memorable parade two years ago. The thing that makes the parade so memorable is how often our own kids are able to be in it. In fact, I used my own experiences in an upcoming fantasy trilogy.

“Are either of you going to be in the Fourth of July parade?” Cherise asked, changing the subject.

I nodded. School sports wanted a float, and I’d agreed.

“Carl wants me to be on the crab shack float,” Will said, indicating the owner of the business. “I get to throw candy from the boat.”

“Sounds fun,” I said. “I’m just walking the parade route. What about you, Cherise?”

She shook her head. “Nope, not me. I get to chase candy. Maybe Chace will keep me company.”

~Myrtle Beach Adventure by Kandi J Wyatt

My son in the Cape Blanco Soccer Club float inspired the main character’s part in the parade.

As for the candy mentioned, my twenty-year-old son yesterday filled his hood with everything from Tootsie Rolls to chocolate coins and Starbursts. We live in an area where it’s still okay to throw candy out during a parade.

Meeting everyone and their dog

The phrase quite literally applies. I’d never thought anything about it before, until one 4th of July at the parade I began to notice the amount of dogs there. Yesterday, my fifteen-year-old became acutely aware of every single dog because he tried to walk a sheep through the parade route with dogs barking and scaring his sheep.

(Once the 4th of July arrived, our characters enjoy a dingy race, after the race they walk uptown.)

 

We hadn’t been able to get lunch yet; so, we headed back up to the square where they had hamburgers and hot dogs for sale. Once we made it through the line, and had greeted everyone from school and those who had known us all our lives, we headed back to the beach to eat. The weather was perfect. I couldn’t remember a Fourth of July in my fourteen years that had not been windy. The beach was crowded with people in the water and on the sand. The volleyball tournament started shortly after we sat down. We enjoyed watching while we ate.

~Myrtle Beach Adventure by Kandi J Wyatt

Fireworks up close and personal

We live in a town small enough to not have their own fireworks display. So we can either head north or south to the next town. Last year we decided to go north thirteen miles to watch the fireworks instead of heading south. I realized for the first time how unique our normal experience of literally feeling the reverberation of the titanium charged fireworks is. It didn’t seem right to watch fireworks and not hear the swoosh as they shot up into the air or experience the sensation that the sparks are going to fall down on you. This does come with a price; we bundle up in stocking caps, blankets, and winter jackets to watch the show on the hill overlooking the beach.

By the time people gathered on the beach and the dune behind it to watch the fireworks, we had met up with my folks and Karis. Mom had brought several blankets and sweatshirts for us to wear. Any other year and I would have begged to have both, but this summer, I didn’t need either of them. We all commented on how strange it was.

~Myrtle Beach Adventure by Kandi J Wyatt

When we could actually watch the show from the beach like I depicted in the story, we’d often get to see the sparks fizzle out in the water.

I’d love to hear about a community event that you cherish. Is there a special time when everyone gets together and celebrates or just enjoys being together? Let me know in the comments.

1. Find locations you can hangout at for the day

Around here, we have the ocean beaches, river banks, lake, and creeks to go relax. The kids and I have lazied away many summer afternoons on the shore of Floras Creek. While the kids played in the water, I drew, read a book, or just soaked up the sun. I miss those days; with the kids growing older, we’ve not had a lazy afternoon at the creek in over two summers! You might not have a creek to go to, but you can hangout at the swimming pool, park, or other location. Take a lunch, a snack, sunscreen and have fun.

2. Check out the summer program at the library

Our family hasn’t taken full advantage of the summer programs in our areas, but I know they include reading incentives, crafts, prizes, and guest speakers. Librarians spend many hours planning how to help your child engage and learn. Besides, who doesn’t want their child enjoying a good book?

3. Go camping

I remember many nights growing up that we went camping, but not in the normal sense of the word. We grabbed old blankets, threw them over the clothesline, and made a tent. During the day, it was our play house, and at night, we slept out under the stars. Some of my kids’ favorite memories are camping in Ashland, Oregon. Find a place that has a little something for everyone to enjoy and try it out. Then make it a tradition.

4. Join a club

My sister-in-law and her boys are heavily involved in Boys Scouts, while my backyard has two lambs in it for 4-H fair. Over the years, my kids have participated in 4-H several times. My youngest’s first entered a Lego creation in fair when he was four or five years old. The older kids had photography, drawings, and other projects in 4-H. 4-H enables your child to explore and learn many skills they wouldn’t normally have access to.

5. Help in a community garden

I remember one year growing up when we participated in a garden. It was so fun to watch the plants grow and then be able to eat the produce. I don’t have a green thumb; in fact, I’ve killed a cactus! However, I appreciate those who can plant a seed, water it, weed around it, nurture the fledgling plant, and bring fruit to bear.

6. Sign up for a class

Our local art gallery often has art classes for kids. The dance studio has special classes in the summer as well. You may want to try something different. One year, we joined a martial arts dojo. It became a staple for the next couple of years until our Sensai moved and I had a baby. (Yep, I actually tested for a rank at eight months pregnant.) When I write a fight scene, I draw from my experiences in Aikido.

What are your ideas for keeping sane through the summer? Need some more ideas? Check out my blog post from last year.

1. Attitude is everything.

My first road trip of any real length occurred when I was eight years old. My family moved from Iowa to Washington. The two thousand mile trip could have been a disaster with three kids, a car, a moving truck, and another family of three. Instead, mom and dad looked at it as an adventure. We explored the whole trip. Even when mom saw the barren wastes of Eastern Washington and in shock said, “If this is your beautiful Washington, send me back home,” even then, there was a feeling of adventure. Other trips followed. The Christmas visits to see grandparents litterally was over the mountains and through the woods. Usually, with wind howling around the station wagon as we traveled the monotonous oil fields of Wyoming. Yet, the adventure of stuffing blankets up against the doors to block out the enemy wind still permeated the family. The wonder of being able to stay awake past the normal bedtime to keep the driver awake filled our young minds with a sense of awe, especially when our city eyes beheld the vast expanse of the sky.

Your attitude on a road trip can determine the whole mood of the event.Tweet

Will you go in grumpy and grumbling? If so, your kids will pick up on that as will your spouse. Been there and seen that! Will you view it as a necesity? If so, the trip could turn into just doing what has to be done. Frustrations will build as what has to happen gets waylaid by life’s unexpected happenings. The final option is to do like my parents and treat the trip as an adventure! Who knows what we’ll find around the next hill! Your kids will pick up on the excitement and their attitudes will adjust. Yes, there will be the inevitible issues of tired, cranky kids, but you’ll be able to handle it better and may even get the kids to adjust as well.

2. Have daily routines.

One of the great memories from my first family road trip almost forty years ago was the daily unwrapping of a small toy. Grandma had purchased small car-friendly toys we could play with along the way and as a way of remembering her. One of those toys was a wind up doll about three inches tall. Mine was a baby in a walker. When we wound her up, she would stroll across a surface. I had that doll for twenty some years. My daughter may still have it in her doll collection! Creating a meaningful gift for your child doesn’t have to be expensive. I don’t think Grandma would have paid over $3 in today’s economy for each gift. She counted out the days of the trip and had each gift wrapped up. Each child had their own little basket and we could choose which to open on which day. There was a set time each day to open up our toys.  As a parent, you could create some fun daily routines in the car, whether it’s opening a gift or having a treat at a specific time.

3. Have fun car activities planned.

There are a ton of car games you can play with your kids. If they’re old enough to have gone on school trips, they’ll even have some of their own they could teach you!

The alphabet game:

This activity is a fun paced game in the city or a slightly slower one out in the country. The interstate is a great place to play. Everyone wants to find words that have the letters of the alphabet in them. However, you’re looking for them in alphabetical order, and you’re trying to be the first to get all the way to the letter Z. If you’re playing with little kids, then you may want to allow everyone to use the same word that someone finds. However, with older children, it becomes a challenge to find the word first. An additional challenge is to find words that start with the letter you need.

The license plate game:

I play this game every summer. I look to see how many different states and Canadian provinces I can see in our town. It’s always fun to see where all the tourists are coming from. For the car, you’re trying to find as many States and Provinces you can. Don’t forget to look at semi-trucks. They provide many of the harder to find States. You can print off a map of the US and Canada and laminate it or put it in a sleeve protector and kids can color in the States they find. You could also download a pdf copy and put it into an app like Bamboo Paper and then electronicly mark them off.

Audio books:

Our family loves to listen to audio books on road trips. I find as a driver my brain stays alert more when there’s a plot happening. For some reason it’s not the same if I’m creating the plot in my head versus hearing it outloud. Audio books are available through audible, or your local library. You can download them from the online library that services your local area, or check out CDs from your public library.

Movies:

With today’s technology, parents can plug in a video in their vehicle and keep the kids busy for hours on end. Since the purpose of most road trips is to spend time with family, I would discourage movie watching. However, if it is kept to a minimum and everyone gets to watch the same one, it could be used as family time. This could fall into the daily routine activity as well.

4. Look for inexpensive places to stop.

I vividly remember watching the signs for free ice water from Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota. We would count down the miles until we could stop for that refreshing taste. While there, we’d usually spend the extra for an ice cream cone as well. In the winter, we’d eagerly search for Little America, Wyoming, as a place to warm up and get hot cocoa. These places still exist today.

Whether they’re historical markers, rest areas, or small town attractions, free or inexpensive stops can be a lifesaver on a trip.Tweet

This summer, if you’re planning a family road trip, take some time to make it bareable for everyone involved. Set aside some daily activities, plan some games, map out the inexpensive stops, and above all don’t dread your trip. View it as an adventure ready to happen!

1. Make sure it fits your child.

Whether it’s basketball, swimming, paintball, or fiddling, your children have something that they enjoy doing. Make sure that camp has that activity available for them. There are numerous sports camps each summer that your kids could attend. One year, we even considered sending our daughter out of state to a fiddle camp where she could expand her violin and piano abilities.

We learned the hard way though that if camp doesn’t fit your children, then they won’t stick it out or enjoy it. As a counselor I had seen the crying kids who were away from home for the first time, but it wasn’t until our twenty-two year old was in third grade, did I send a kid to camp who didn’t belong there. Our son had enjoyed his week up at Camp Fircroft with all the people from our church and even his aunt in the kitchen cooking. So, when we heard about another camp up at Fircroft, we signed him up. We didn’t look into it. It was designed for the city kids to get a glimpse of country life and share the Bible at the same time. However, there was no one up at camp that our son knew! The place was the same, but the way it was run and the people were different. This made all the difference in the world. By Wednesday, we had the call to go up the mountain and pick him up. Several years later, he was able to return to that same camp and enjoy it, but he had two other siblings with him and knew what to expect.

2. Make sure it fits your beliefs.

Camps are a great place to have kids start to think about life goals and decisions. They are in an isolated, controlled environment with people who care about them. At Camp Fircroft, it’s literally a mountain top experience. It was while at a family camp in Iowa, that my parents made the decision to leave their job and go to Bible College. Just this last week, Mom was reminiscing about that summer camp forty-two years ago! Camps have a huge impact on the lives of people both kids and adults. Knowing ahead of time the philosophy of the camp is a wise idea.

One camp we sent the kids to had a baptism at the end of the week for kids who had made decisions for Christ! That flabbergasted us. We couldn’t imagine how something so important could be done without parents around.

3. Make sure it fits your budget.

The number of summer camps available for you to choose from is astronomical. You could have your kid in camp all summer vacation long! However, it would ruin your pocket book and you’d not have any time with him or her. So, make sure the camp fits with your personal budget. I know when we had four kids at once attending camp, it was expensive despite the multi-child discount offered. Yet, it was worth our money to see how the kids came back excited and having gained new friends. Each year as they head up to camp, they look forward to making new friends.

4. Make sure it fits your family.

Camp should be for the camper, but that means it should fit your family’s values and likes and dislikes. One thing that our kids have loved about Camp Fircroft is the fact that it’s designed for country kids. The cabins just until the last few years were log structures where creatures often ran across the rafters. Kids loved it! They also loved the structured activities of archery and target practice (BBs for the younger camp and .22 for older camps). They looked forward to junior high camp with much anticipation as they then could join in on paintball. All of these activities are ones that our family enjoys.

Fitting the family could also mean that the camp enables your family to be a part of it. For the last seven years or so, someone from our family has gone up to high school or junior high camp on Thursday night. We may get to see the skits, but then as a family, we perform a fire show! It has become a highlight of camp and much talked about afterward. When a camper sees our sons step out on the cement basketball court and begin to handle fire, respect suddenly blooms where it may or may not have been before. Our youngest felt that this last week at camp. Suddenly, his status was raised as he twirled the fire staff and handled the fire sword.

So whether your kids love basketball or dancing, make sure you take advantage of a summer camp near you. Do you have a special memory of summer camp? I’d love to hear it.

Plan a bucket list

I saw this a couple of years ago. A mom of young boys, had a butcher paper poster on her dining room wall. Written in childish scrawl and adult handwriting, was their bucket list. Since I saw it in July, some things had been scratched off, but there were still a ton of things to look forward to.

A bucket list is a wish list. Explain to your littler ones that not everything will be crossed off by the end of the summer, but the goal is to see how many different things you can do.

Examples would include eating lunch outside, going to the pool, taking a bike ride, watching fireworks, etc. Remember to add your normal summer activities. If you go to grandma’s for the Fourth of July, write it on your list. Take in a summer library program. Read books to your kids. Need a list of suggestions? Check out suggested reading material from my posts for Spring Break, February, and Children’s Book Week. The Seed Saver series may give you another activity to add to your bucket list–gardening!

Make a Peace Chart

Once your bucket list is made, you may need a peace chart. The peace chart was introduced to me by my mother-in-law early on in my child rearing years. My kids were arguing and fighting and whining. It wasn’t pretty. My mother-in-law saw an advise article in the Democrat Herald of Albany, Oregon. It suggested what I then created as The Peace Chart. I took a regular piece of paper, placed the title Peace Chart on the top and the verse from Romans 14:19 in my own paraphrase, “Do everything in your power to keep the peace”, at the bottom. In between the title and the verse, I placed a table. Each row represented a day of the week. Each column represented a time when the kids ‘broke’ my peace and I had to intervene. At first they had three warning boxes that would be checked off as they broke the peace. After those first warnings though, came privileges they’d lose, such as no movies, no video games, no more water activities, and eventually no more playing outdoors and go to your room! Rarely did they make it to their rooms.

I did learn to make the privileges things I could handle them losing.

For instance, I left going to their room as the last resort because I knew it would be more a fight for me to follow through with it.

Enjoy the Small Things

One of the things I looked forward to the most about summer with the kids was huckleberry pancakes. We live in a rural area and fresh berries are available by walking out the door and picking them. We’d all traipse outside in the morning and pick the red huckleberries to use in our breakfast pancakes or muffins.

Another enjoyable activity was having the kids help pick center pieces for the table. They didn’t have to be elaborate, just something we found in our adventures that day. If we went to the creek, we’d bring back some river rock and place it around a candle on the table. If we were in the yard and found flowers, we’d pick some for the table. It was a simple thing that brought beauty to the day and gave a conversation starter for the kids to talk with Dad around the evening meal. That seed probably is why we have such great times around our dinner table now with the kids in their twenties and mid teens. Check out more about that in my post, A Lost Art.

So what will you do this summer? What’s on your bucket list? Anything special? Let me know in the comments.

This summer though was different. I was busy editing and promoting my first book release. I spent time on the computer connecting via social media, email, and the internet with my team and future readers. I made friends that I have never met face-to-face but I would not trade knowing them for anything in this world. I have entered the world of a published author. It feels strange to stay, and I still blush when people I know stop me and say, “Did I hear right? You have a book that was published?”

Through it all, I did take the time to go to the lake, the ocean, drive kids up to summer camp, spent a weekend at an SCA event, and took some art classes to relax. It made for a fun but full summer. Now it is time to prepare for the fall leaves and school. I’m looking forward to seeing what the students have in store for me this year. They always teach me something. Last year, they gave me the title and series name of Dragon’s Future: book 1 of the Dragon Courage series. I also was inspired to write another book or two. This new idea has some of my students as the template for the main characters. Maybe, just maybe, it will inspire them to read.

Hanging out with the family at Cape Blanco Country Music Festival.

“Dance with Me” My daughter and son at Cape Blanco Country Music Festival.