What a wonderful, winter staycation

For the first time in my adult life, as far as I can remember, I just had a week and a half staycation.

What is a staycation?

Well, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary a staycation is “a vacation spent at home or nearby.”

This is precisely what my family did last week.

After the Christmas festivities, our family left. My husband and I decided we didn’t really want to travel anywhere with a three-year-old and six-year-old in such cold weather so we decided to have a staycation.

I must say it was a nice experience, but next time I would like to have a staycation in the summer.

During our week, we kept our endless, energy-filled boys busy with games, movies, projects, visiting friends and going places.

We went to the recreation center and swam at the pool one afternoon. The boys enjoyed it and they slept well that night, which is a great bonus. On a different day when the sun was out and there was no wind we took the boys sledding. They had a great time going down the hill as fast as the sled would carry them while my husband and I got a good workout pulling them back up the hill.

Another day, we went to the movie theater and saw “The Good Dinosaur.” It was a cute movie about what the world would be like if the dinosaurs never went extinct. The boys ate a lot of popcorn and enjoyed the movie. They couldn’t stop talking about how cute the baby in the movie was.

Later in the week, we read library books we checked out from the library and played games like Lite Brite, Trouble and Avalanche Food Stand. We also found time to work on kindergarten workbooks with Matthew and preschool workbooks with John. 

When we were not busy with this stuff, we were busy with projects. The boys love to do crafts and one day they were watching a show on how to make rockets out of straws. My husband had also seen the show and decided to take the boys to the store to buy “rocket supplies.”

About an hour later, they returned with paper lunch bags, paper clips, tape, string and balloons. My husband drew rockets on the side of the lunch bags and had my boys color them. While they were coloring their rockets with markers, my husband set up a string that extended from the bedroom to the kitchen. 

Then, they taped the paper clips to the paper lunch bags, which were now being called rockets. They attached the paper clips to the string. Once the rockets were in place, they blew up balloons, placed them in the bags, and let them go. The rockets zoomed across the string over the sofa. This cause a huge outburst from the boys. Their laughter filled the house.

It’s moments like these that really made our staycation such an amazing experience. It also reminded me that you don’t have to spend a lot of money or go on fancy vacations to make lasting memories.