Weekend Fun Recap: August 29–31

How was your weekend? It’s a holiday weekend here (and my girls have a bonus day off on Tuesday), but my Labor Day plans mostly consist of grocery shopping, so I’m just focusing on Friday through Sunday like usual. One area of fun that I’d like to learn to do better is taking advantage of these long weekends. Our little guy is getting easier to travel with, but it still seems like these breaks sneak up on us. If you have any great travel-planning tips for taking advantage of these bonus days, let me know in the comments!

The picture above is from our first (short) Disney trip with our oldest—not exactly a long weekend, but we combined it with a work trip for my husband. I was about 14 weeks pregnant with our middle kid too, so she likes to include the trip in her count. Oldest kid was not quite a year old and took an epic nap on Jungle Cruise, missing all the fun. Keep reading to discover when I would have liked to have followed her example this weekend…

Family Game Night

We’ve added a little bonus element of fun to family game night by trying to guess which game the selector chose 20-questions style. It was middle kid’s week to pick, and I correctly guessed that she wanted to play Disney’s Jungle Cruise Adventure Game. I picked this up as a gift for my husband a few years ago, but the kids had never played.

This game is probably best for hardcore Disney fans. You get some classic Jungle Cruise puns. But the real groaning comes when you realize how long this mostly-luck-based game is going to take. The gameplay is fairly simple, but I found it became tedious after a while. It took our family of four close to an hour to finish the game. Given that each turn was roughly the same every time, this felt long. But the kids enjoyed themselves and stuck with it, so maybe the game actually is fun, and I’m just in de-nile.

Brunch

I took the kids over to my mom’s for brunch, which of course I failed to take any pictures of. I was too excited to enjoy waffles, bacon, and her famous cheese grits. The girls stayed to swim a little. I’m determined to usher in fall as soon as possible, so I opted not to wrestle the toddler into the pool and took him home early.

As a side note, this is the first summer I’ve felt comfortable enough with my girls’ swimming skills to let them swim without me. (Don’t worry; they are supervised in the pool, just not by me.) We tried a few different methods for teaching them to swim before I caved and signed them up for year-round lessons at a swim school near us. While it was an investment of time and money for months, it’s finally paying off. There is probably a lesson about having fun in here somewhere.

Family Movie Night

Since we have an extra-long weekend, we decided to start the next movie in the Star Wars sage, Revenge of the Sith. My oldest kid finally caught on that (spoiler alert) Chancellor Palpatine is the Emperor about halfway through the movie. My husband and I saw this movie in the theater when we were dating and sort of vaguely remember that the ending is pretty intense, so we might do some fast-forwarding and summarizing for the kids when it’s time to finish it. The kids were so tired from their fun in the pool that they were ready to go to bed after about an hour.

Church Picnic

Sunday, our church hosted a church-wide picnic for those who stayed in town. We picked up some Publix subs to pair with church-supplied snow cones (this ain’t your grandma’s church picnic). The children wandered a little farther into the woods than we were comfortable with, and the temperature creeped a little past comfortable as well. But we enjoyed catching up with a few members of our church community and letting our kids flex some independence muscles.

Small Group Dinner

Sunday night, we had dinner with our small group, which we’ve been trying to do every month or so. This meal has been a great opportunity for me to implement the Lazy Genius principle of “decide once.” I always make jalapeno popper deviled eggs to share. We always grill sausages. My husband will always be annoyed that our high chair is a pain to transport, so I will be patient with him.

One thing I love about these dinners is that all the kids are included. Every single one of the eight kids in the group was born after our group formed, and two of them are now in high school. It’s bittersweet to watch them growing up before my eyes, knowing that even my little guy will go from high chair to driver’s seat before I know it. They are all great kids, and I appreciate how well they look out for and include mine, who are the youngest of the bunch. It’s also fun to see their interests take shape and cheer them on as they grow up.

Reading Recap

This week, I returned to my beloved village of Three Pines with The Grey Wolf, the 19th installment in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. I love this series, and I’m so impressed with how Penny manages to keep the story fresh this many novels into it. We return to a setting and characters from a previous book as Gamache tries to stop yet another plot rooted in the age-old corrupting influence of power. I’ll be early awaiting book 20, The Black Wolf, releasing October 28.

Little Golden Book

The Little Golden Book for this post is, of course, Jungle Cruise! I personally find the book more fun than the game. The ride itself obviously tops them all, but if you’re looking for another way to bring the fun of Disney vacation home, this book is a great way to revisit the eighth wonder of the world.

Did you do anything exciting over the weekend? Anyone take a cruise (jungle or otherwise)? How long did it take you to figure out who’s who in Star Wars? Let me know in the comments—I love hearing from you!

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