Our Road Trip to the Beach!

Lately C has been begging to go to the beach.  Now there are lots of perks to living here in upstate NY, but being close to a beach is just not one of them, so after a lot of debate and research and going back and forth and what not we decided we were going to surprise the girls with a road trip to Cape Cod.  Hyannis to be exact.  Sure it's a bit further away than some of the other beaches we were looking at, but we knew a) that the beaches are clean, b) the water would be warm with small/no waves and c) that the Cape was open for business rather than still being mostly closed due to Sandy.

So we packed up the girls and set off.  

We made a random bathroom stop at a mall that was about 5 minutes from our final destination, but hey it worked out, because there was a carousel there!  Another thing that C has been asking to do!  

I think she liked

I think A liked it too :) She just kept saying up, down, up, down...
 

We ended up picking Veteran's Memorial Beach to go to since they had a picnic area, however once C saw there was a beach nothing else mattered, she just wanted to be down at the ocean.  So a super quick lunch for Mommy and Daddy, a quick change into swim suits and we were down in the water.

Some awesome things about this beach... 1) NO waves.  Now some people may say, "Ocean with no waves?  What's the point?" but to that I say "I've got kids and it's great not worrying about them getting sucked away by the tide." 2) Shallow waters, the water only got about waist deep in the swimming portion. 3) WARM water, seriously this water was just beautiful, I could (and did) just sit in it for hours.  

I am pretty sure that Hyannis is going to be a place we come to every year, at least once a year, even if it's just for a couple hours.  It's nice to have a place where we can all go to recharge (even if it takes half the day to get there and back lol).

 

Already we are making plans to bring the camper down in the off season so we can do some more exploring. 

Games We Play ~ Cooperative Games

I didn't really think that there would be a type of game that I enjoyed playing more than dice games, but that was before I started playing cooperative games.  These things are awesome! Instead of playing against the other player(s)  you are playing together against the game itself.  Love it. 

First cooperative game we got was Pandemic. The object of the game is to cure and eradicate the four diseases before they take over the world.  Each player has a special power that will help you along the way, but then again the game is working against you.  As I said above, there is one way to win the game - you must cure and eradicate all four of the diseases.  But to *lose* the game, maybe you run out of disease cubes of any given color, or you draw one too many epidemic cards and the epidemic rate goes off the scale, or if we reach too many infections and the infection rate goes off the scale.  Toward the end of the game things can get a little stressful lol.

The only complaint I have about this game is the make over the second edition got.  The little plastic disease cubes are cool and all, but the colors on the blue and black disease cards look just about identical...not cool...Also the color on a couple of the pawns is a bit close so it can get confusing sometimes if those two pawns are in play.  

You can see the game in play on TableTop here .

 

The second cooperative game we have is called Forbidden Island.  After we got Pandemic I really wanted to get another cooperative game and this is what we ended up deciding on.  This one is a bit more straight forward and a bit quicker of a game to play.  The object of the game is to collect all of the relics before the island sinks.  Once again there is one way to win the game but several ways to loose it...if Fools Landing (the helicopter pad) sinks, you have no way off the island and you loose, if all of the pathways leading to fools landing sinks, you have no way off the island and you loose, if the water level rises too high...you loose.  Also as with Pandemic each character gets special abilities to give the players a fighting chance against the island. 

Love this game, the relic pieces and cards are sturdy and the art work on the cards are really beautiful, no complaints here. 

See the game being played on TableTop here. 

I'm now addicted to these types of games.  We have only played these games with two players, I'm sure it would greatly change the dynamic of the game playing with more people, but it works great with just two.  It's fun to be bouncing ideas off each other and working together to get to a common goal.  We will definitely be getting more of these types of games to play!

Updating the List

Updating and editing our summer list a bit.  Taking off some items that the girls need to be a bit older to enjoy with us and things that apparently are just *way* out of our budget range at the moment (~cough~Zoom Flume~cough~) and added a couple others that I think will be fun!!

~ Go to the Ocean
~ Freeze and Free Toys in an Ice Block
~ Explore Spring/Summer at the  Pine Bush Discovery Center
~ Ride the carousel at the State Museum
~ Make a Rain Gauge to Measure Rain

DONE!

~ Make a Fairy Garden
~ Make S'mores
~ Have a Front Yard Camp Fire
~ Have a Super Fun Super Hero Family Photo Shoot
~ Have a Picnic
~ Go to Free Comic Book Day
~ Go Camping
~ Put up a Clothes Line
~ Go to the Drive-In
~ Have a Squirt Gun Fight
~ Plant Our Garden
~ Make Ice Cube boats
~ Race Soap Boats
~ Make Sidewalk Chalk Paint
~ Stargaze with the Telescope...Show the Girls the Moon Up Close!
~ Go Geocaching

Geocaching ~ Summer Bucket List

A couple weeks ago, we decided to get out of the house and playing in nature for a while.  There are a couple of Earth Caches in a preserve that isn't to far from us (one that we had no idea existed before geocaching lol).

An earth cache is different from a traditional cache in that you aren't looking for a hidden box filled with stuff but you are looking for a specific piece of earth, or something pertaining directly to mother nature.  I LOVE these types of caches.

The first cache we went in search of was a ruler in the middle of the creek.  To claim a find for this cache you were supposed to observe how high the water level was take a pic and post it on the cache page.  Well...as you can see, it seems the recent massive rains and flash floods took the ruler for a ride.  Still, it makes for a more interesting pic even if we couldn't find out how high the creak actually was.

The next cache we went in search of was more interesting by far (though if the ruler had been in place it would have been neat to take the girls back during a dry spell to physically see the difference in the creek level...)

To claim credit for this next cache we had to find (and photograph) some fossils and observe (and photograph) the different types of rocks in the creek.  I was pretty amazed at the number of fossils that were out here, I guess the girls were a bit young to understand the significance of the fossils, but it will be neat to bring them back there in the future.  We brought a couple specimens home with us, but we left most of what we found exactly where we found them.  And the different rock formations down here are just awesome to look at, its just amazing to think of the glaciers moving over the earth and making everything we see today.

All in all it was a good day, though I think we adults got more out of it than the girls did at this point.  Still it was fun to get out and explore.  Plus the girls got to see some fish and collect some new rocks, even if they did have hot a melt down all the way back to the car.

Also as a side note, C is becoming quite the little cacher, she saw some PVC pipe attached to a tree and pointed it out saying "Look!  I found the treasure!" and yes there are quite a few caches out there that are PVC pipes disguised as tree branches.  These, however, are something else, not quite sure what though.

Can't wait for the weather to cool down a bit so we can get out again!!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Look There's a Full MOON!

One of the items on our summer bucket list was to let the girls stay up late and see the moon through the telescope.  I figured what better moon to see than a Super one!  Turns out prime viewing time for us was about 10 pm so C got to stay up WAY past her bed time to see it, A on the other hand was sound asleep by the time Mr. Moon decided to make his appearance...

We went out about 8ish (since I had no idea what time moon rise really was) and we just sat there talking about the cheeky little bunny that has been eating our garden and the bugs that were crawling on the ground and all sorts of other stuff, she even sang a song of the moon to try and wake it up, eventually the mosquito got to be too much so we headed back inside for a while.

After about another hour of waiting (and about 2 extra Dora episodes) we finally got lucky when we went out and found the nice bright yellow moon out!   We ran back in, sprayed ourselves down with copious amounts of bug spray, grabbed Daddy, the Telescope and the camera and went out to see what we could see!

C asked loads of great questions and we got to talk with her about what was on the moon and what clouds were made of and why we need them.  The clouds weren't really very cooperative, especially when we were trying to show C the stars, but it was just plain amazing watching through the telescope as they covered the moon.  

Of course I had to take some pics...these I took through the scope by holding my phone up to it...

And this morning of course C didn't sleep in at all, but before she even got out of bed she was asking to look up at the sky with the telescope, I think we have created a monster.  And that is a-okay with me.

Crossing things off the list

Unofficial start to summer was last weekend and it came in cold and rainy, but looks like the heat is coming in this week!

So anyway, we have been chipping things off our bucket list slowly but surely, here's a list of what we have done so far...

~ Make a Fairy Garden ~ For Earth Day we made fairy gardens!  I didn't get around to doing a seperate post on them but here are some pics

The finished product ended up looking like a hot mess (should have pre moistened the soil, live and learn), but they ended up having fun with them and they still play with everything and water the plants so I call this a success!

~ Have a front yard fire and make s'mores ~ Well we had a fire just before A's birthday, it was chilly and I didn't get a picture of the fire itself, but I did get a few pics of the s'mores.  Turns out our girls just don't like s'mores, they love all the pieces in their raw form and separate, but melt them and put them together?  No.Way.

~ Have a Super Fun Super Hero Family Photo Shoot ~ Our good friend Miriam over at Five Oceans Photography (Here is her facebook page!) took our family pics for us, it was so great to get in front of the camera for a while and she caught some really great moments!  Can't wait to get some printed out and update our pics on the walls :)

~ Have a Picnic ~  Back when I was working on my final for Photography, we took a trip to the park so I could take some pics.  While we were at it, I packed up a picnic dinner and Hubby and the girls set it up while I was doing my pics!  We had such a good time, I think this needs to be come a monthly thing if not more :)

~ Go to Free Comic Book Day ~ Posted about this one here, but I found one more pic!

 

~ Go Camping ~ We went Camping over Memorial Day weekend, it was our first trip as a family!  And it was a cold, wet weekend :) but we made the best of it and I have a full post coming soon!!

~ Put up a Clothes Line ~ I didn't quite put up a full clothes line yet, but did get a folding rack that I have been drying almost all of our clothes on out on our porch so I'm counting this one as complete.  It has been great not having to use our dryer all the time, between a simple $15 clothes rack (soon to be two racks so I can dry EVERYTHING outside) and our solar panels we have noticed a huge difference in our energy savings!!

~ Go to the Drive-In ~ This one was a Mommy & Daddy only thing, but I think part of having a happy family is having a good a great relationship between Mom and Dad :) . Part of that is having some all alone adult time, so we loaded Chevy Potter up with pillows and blankets, loaded up the cooler up with some soda and popped some popcorn then headed to the drive in to see Iron Man 3.  When we got there we got a couple of Sundaes and played some Timeline, it was a great night!  (We happened to be in our matching Superman shirts from going to Free Comic Book Day earlier, people were really not to happy to see that!  We kept getting comments about it not being a Superman movie...Really people?!)

~Make Sidewalk Chalk Paint ~ Yesterday we made sidewalk chalk paint! It was so easy and the girls had so much fun with it!  Used equal parts cornstarch and water then added 1 drop of food coloring to each of the muffin cups, quick and easy and loads of fun...

Games We Play - Dice Games

I am pretty much in love with dice games.  Don't get me wrong I LOVE games in general, but with dice games we can sit down after a long day and just play a couple of rounds, throw the dice back in the box and get on to bed.  They (mostly) don't require a lot of set up and (mostly) don't require a lot of brain power which is especially awesome after a long, stressful, exhausting day.  

While looking for games to keep us occupied while waiting in line at PAX I came across my first TableTop Episode, it happened to be This One which showcased Tsuro, Get Bit and Zombie Dice.  We decided not only that Zombie Dice would be awesome for line waiting, but we had to run out and get these games the next day.  Essentially that episode of TableTop is what set us of on this game playing journey :) 

But anyway, I digress.  This post is, after all supposed to be about the games we play, not what got us started playing them. 

So on to Zombie Dice this game is super simple to play, skill level is low,  learning curve is basically zero and it is most definitely not a cooperative game.  The idea is that, well, brains are good!  You like to roll brains!  Runners you re-roll, so they are the neutral party.  Shotgun blasts are bad, three blasts and you are gone AND you loose all your brains, stop rolling before you get to that point :) 

This is a pretty well played game for us, we probably play it at least once a week.  Plus it's pretty portable so I throw it in my purse when we go out on date nights, it's nice to have something we can play so we don't end up both playing on our phones for half the night!

The next game is called Pig, though I've been trying to come up with a new name for it since the Pig game we usually play is a card game we play with my Mom-in-Law.  But anyway this game is also super easy with no learning curve.  The rules of the game are simple, be the first to get above 100 and you win.  You can roll as many times as you want before you stop, but make sure you stop before you roll a 1, if you roll a 1 and your turn is over and you don't get any points, roll snake eyes and you loose all points you have collected up to that point.  

The first time we played this we played with normal six sided dotted dice, but I decided it would be more interesting to play with some different dice so I pulled out some others.  The hardest part about this game is adding up the points when your exhausted, other than that it's great fun! It will be an excellent one to introduce to the girls for number recognition and counting.  

The last game here I got as a mother's day gift, and I love it!  This one takes a bit more thinking and effort and is a bit more involved than the other two but it's still easy to play and it's loads of fun (though Hubby will disagree with that statement since I kicked his butt...).  Essentially you are rolling the dice in this game to build Roads, Settlements, Cities and Armies.  Now neither Hubby nor I have ever played any of the variations of the board game of Settlers of Catan so we didn't know really what we needed to build any of these items so it took us a while to figure out what we actually had or needed with each roll.  It took us about 40 minutes to play instead of the suggested 15-20 minutes on the box.  

I like this one the best of the three I think.  It's got just enough extra that it's not just about the luck of the roll, but also it's not so involved that we can't just play a quick game after we put the girls in bed and before we go to bed ourselves.

When I was researching this game I found that a lot of people out there don't really like it, but mostly they are people who had already played and love the full version of Catan.  Never having played that version I didn't have anything to compare the dice against.  I think in the future we will absolutely be adding Settlers of Catan to our collection, but I think this will still get more play time since it's a) quick and b) portable.  Love those portable games.