When we were at the lumber yard to buy the wood for our horse project, I saw a Wham-O Slip-n-Slide on the clearance table for $5.


Best $5 I've spent in some time. 

 
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Last week up north was so much fun it was hard to choose what to include for this "something fun" section. In the end, I went with these. Every day, as the sun was setting we went for a walk on the beach or one final swim. They are usually in bed before sundown, so the kids really enjoyed the show over Lake Michigan each night.

Here's the girl, out sitting on her "mermaid rock" (don't worry: it was on a shoal where the water was only about a foot deep).

One night, we walked down to an old Odawa Indian burial ground right along the water that dates back to the 1700s, even before the Jesuit mission was built there in 1741:

We were there for seven nights, and this was the only one to have a disappointing sunset:

This was the first night, and in the girl's view, the best one of all. I think she was just really excited about being there.

 

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Our neighborhood has this huge community sandbox area, and sometimes the neighbor kids bring out plastic beach toys (probably the same plastic rakes, shovels, and buckets for sale at every Wal-Mart and Target across the country).  For some reasons the kids don't really use them in the sand box, but I noticed a few weeks ago that whenever I brought over our real metal shovel the kids would fight over it. So we went to the thrift store the other day and dropped about $5 on a huge bag of metal pie pans and utensils and bakeware (again, probably less than the standard plastic beach set at your standard big box). The kids have played with this stuff every day since we brought it home, making all kinds of disgusting food that I have to pretend to eat.
  

It's just further proof that some of the oldest ideas are still the best. Since we started discretely leaving the cooking stuff under a bush near the playground, we've noticed new spoons, bowls, and other utensils have magically appeared in the bucket.

 

Previous Fun

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