I'm still learning...

So I'm playing around and I figured out how to post a picture to my blog. The problem is that I posted the picture without a caption, hense the photo below of Emily-Ann in her recital costume holding her flowers post performance and me. The recital was this past Sunday afternoon. To see more photos visit my Facebook site. Just look up Cyndi S. Stepich and enjoy!

 

The Beginning of Summer 2008

SO, Summer 2008 is here. I must perfect the art of entertaining 3 children of various ages, almost 15, 7 and 5 on a shoestring budget. One of the joys of being a stay at home mommy is that I get to...ummmm...STAY AT HOME...with the kids...during the summer. Did I say that was a joy? Yes, it is. Most of the time. A definate drawback is being part of a one income household. A one income household in Southern California. In a time when gasoline is holding at $4.59 a gallon. With our minivan, that amounts to about $105 to fill up her tank. SO, I must now think of some pretty creative ways to entertain the kids. We are just finishing our first full week of the 3 of them being out of school. SO far they have been happy just to stick around the house and ride their bikes, make a "theatre" in the den (this consists of hanging a dark blanket over the french doors to black out the room and watching a DVD they haven't seen a thousand times!), play in the jacuzzi and pretend it's a pool complete with goggles and torture each other. We also went to see "Kung Fu Panda" at Citiwalk. Tim was shocked that in a week, I only put 40ish miles on the van. I told him I was really trying to cut corners every way I could.

Future Low-Cost Summer Plans:

Trips to the Library
Trips to the Beach
More Bike rides, weather permitting of course...we could even take the bikes to one of the many bike paths in the area and make a full day of it
Trips to the YMCA that we have belonged to for years but rarely go to
A movie a week (Tim gets discounted movie tickets through E!)
Picnics at the park
PLAYDATES!

If anyone has any ideas that they would like to share, please do so...I need all the help I can get. THANKS!