Last year, for our Easter egg hunt, the Easter Bunny filled plastic eggs with chocolate and candy and hid them all around our back yard. But the backyard wildlife got to many of them before our kids could find them.
So this year, the Easter Bunny put numbered clues in the plastic eggs that he/she hid all around the back yard. Carrson and Turner have to find the eggs and use the clues to hunt down their Easter baskets full of chocolate, candy and gifts, hidden somewhere in the house.
Outdoor family fun doesn’t have to be complicated! Give the kids some shovels and in no time there’ll be deep holes and drama.
It wasn’t long until water started to seep into the bottom of Carrson’s hole, creating a boot sucking mud the consistency of quicksand. By the time Carrson was frustrated enough to ask for help, he was seriously stuck.
Luckily, I had my phone handy to capture the rescue attempts and silliness. Who knew digging a hole could be so complicated – and funny.
Parkour has been on the kids’ brains for the whole last half of winter. Leaps, vaults and rolls, oh my! Now the snow is gone so they’re taking their parkour training from the back deck and heading in to town.
First stop, the unused train tracks just a short walk from our house. Actually, Carrson and Turner had so much fun practicing their parkour with the tracks, it was the one and only stop of the day. Heck, I even got into it a bit.
A special shout-out to @STORROR and the #storrorarmy for their inspirational videos and amazing community.
Our family loves Minecraft but sometimes we need a break from the larger challenges of fighting the Ender Dragon or expanding our empire. So we make up lots of fun, silly games to do inside of vanilla Minecraft.
Today, Turner wants to battle in Minecraft!
So, we’re stripping off our armour, putting our weapons away and rolling up our sleeves to have an epic one-on-one multi-day bare knuckle battle outside. Picture a UHC match with just 2 players and none of that boring mining stuff before the battle! And we have to deal with hostile mobs, increasing hunger and the hot hard hits from each other.
A few people asked about Carrson’s homemade super-cheap minnow traps after I mentioned them in a recent video. So I stitched together some old footage from an earlier minnow trapping expedition to our local creek. The audio isn’t great but it has all the information needed for you to build and set your own DIY minnow bait traps.
This video is from the first time we tried this type of trap. You can see by Carrson’s reactions it’s a BIG winner! We want to shout out to @DArms319 and the Arms Family Homestead channel for the inspiration for this cheap and easy design.
To catch lots of minnows for basically free, all you need is an empty clear water, pop or soda bottle, a knife, some sort of clip (we used a metal “fold back” binder clip), bait such as a few pieces of dog food or bread scraps, and some string or a twig. Oh, you also need a gentle stream, creek or pond where you’ve spotted some minnows swimming around.
Just another boring outdoor family excursion along some of the most beautiful and unique winter landscapes in Ontario.
Each winter, the cold winds off Georgian Bay push freezing water onto the shallow, sandy shores of Wasaga Beach. It creates a surreal, other-worldly mash-up of snow volcanoes, ice flats and pressure cracks that the vast majority of the world never gets to see.
And we live 8 minutes away!
I personally love parking a ways away and walking through the cedar forest trail to the frozen beach with my kids. Watching their demeanor change with the landscape just makes me feel like I’m doing right by my kids.
Some notes about this video:
The space where ice meets open water can be deadly. We know this beach very well. It’s shallow for a long ways out. Even then, the ice hills created by the wind and snow can be deceptively dangerous, especially if they become slick and slippery. The valleys can be difficult to climb out of if the slopes become slick ice. I scouted the area in advance and chose an area that was mostly flat. During the video, I’m carrying safety/rescue gear and a GPS enabled cell phone. I tested the signal strength in advance.
Also, with my focus on safety, I missed recording some super funny and endearing footage of the kids on the way back off the ice. By then, they were more comfortable with the landscape, and the forest was in sight. So they started being more playful, but I missed capturing all that. My apologies.
After we defeated the Ender Dragon in Minecraft recently, we were looking for other fun and challenging things to do in Minecraft Survival. So we invented, “Iron Rush”.
The rules are simple: First to get Iron in their inventory wins! But there’s a surprising amount of strategy involved. What would you do? Start digging and mine for iron? Or sprint and look for a cave or a ravine? Do you worry about food, a sword and torches or go fast and light with just a pickaxe?
In this first ever Iron Rush challenge, Carrson and I choose two very different strategies. One turns out to be much more successful than the other!
I can’t believe it’s been almost a year of living with Covid in the world!. I found this short video the other day and thought I’d share it…
We were in lockdown mode in the spring of 2020 but we tried to stay positive. Christine’s school put a call out for videos of how teachers’ family were coping with the isolation, so we put this short video together.
Now, we’re closing in on one year of the “new normal” and it’s amazing to see that we’re basically doing the same things to stay sane and safe as we were back then. Though the outdoor sports have changed with the seasons. Stay safe everyone, and try to have fun.
Watch what happens when our family spends a full winter day on the back deck. SO MUCH FUN! (Disclaimer, no children’s tailbones were harmed in the making of this video… just a few bruised egos 😉
Turner’s so tired but he’s hungry too. Can he finish his cracker before sleep overtakes him? It’s an epic battle! Disclaimer: NO slow-motion used in this video – it only looks that way cause the poor buddy is shutting down while chewing.
