Staycations Rock!
We all know how many suggestions bloggers like to give but how many actually try out their own ideas? Well, we wanted to walk the walk so our family stayed in one of our homes and tried different things from our blog posts!
Doing schoolwork by the tree!
Our Week
Work/School - Cations at our Vacation Home!
We planned out a full week getaway from Sunday to Sunday in December! There were 10 of us total which was perfect for planning meals and even coordinating who did the dishes which nights. I’m not sure how your family works but when it comes to dishes? Oh, the fights tend to lean on the epic sides of history. In order to combat this, we planned out a schedule for each meal consisting of what food would be in the meal, who was preparing it and who was on dish duty for the evening. This proved to be an absolute game changer and almost (key word being almost) eliminated the dishes argument because everyone was able to mentally prepare ahead of time.
When we arrived on Sunday it was essential to keep the night a little bit lower key and fun because everyone was tired from traveling and unpacking. Due to this, we just made our favorite frozen pizzas and some bagged salad then settled in to watch a movie. There were definitely slight disagreements over which movie to pick but eventually everyone agreed on one of what I think the best movies of all time is: “Surf’s Up”. Once the movie was done, we all settled in for the night and got ready to wake up early and begin the work/school week.
Settling in to watch “Surf’s Up”
On The Daily
Each day we had a continental style breakfast at 8 am, began working/school, lunch at noon, a quick snack at 4, an activity once everyone was done with work, dinner around 7 and then the nights were sort of a free-for-all unless we had a structured activity. Due to COVID 19 there weren’t many options in regard to activities we took to exploring the outdoor areas of Alexandria! Almost every single day that we were there we put on our warm clothes and headed out for a hike of some sort. We visited Brophy Park, walked on the Central Lakes Trail, and visited Carlos State Park. It felt nice to be outside for an hour or so every day after working, plus it got us out of the house and gave us some space from each other for a little bit.
For dinner, everyone took care in crafting their own special meals. We had burgers, spaghetti and meatballs, flank steak fajitas and even bought takeout from Great Hunan one night. To add something fun, we decided to do a dinner where everyone dressed in their best goth outfits. We saw some crazy outfits and even more insane eyeliner featured! We had some teenage boys in our group who were “too cool” and in the group photo they somehow look like the oddballs out when they’re dressed completely normally.
It’s not a phase mom!
Work from your home-away-from-home!
Going on a walk around Brophy Park!
Put Your Game Faces On!
One of my personal favorite parts of this trip was almost every night we would have a little game night. For most of the nights this consisted of “Most Likely To…”, “Cards Against Humanity” or “What Do You Meme?”. One night all the kids went into the garage and played different games like water pong or just regular old ping-pong. It felt amazing to just settle in together after a long day of working and just get to laugh with our favorite people. Most of us are grown up and moved out by now so any time that we get to spend together is cherished.
Take your pick of which game to play!
I can say with full-certainty that this was one of the best family vacations that we have had and we had people aged 13-56 who individually came up to me and said how much fun they were having and how good the change of scenery felt. Everyone there was on our WiFi working or doing schoolwork and they were all able to successfully finish their work and use the WiFi at the same time.
I would 13/10 recommend grabbing your favorite people and escaping to one of our homes during these winter months!
Check out the gorgeous sunrise over Lake Latoka.