Camping In

Oh my!!! We had sooo much fun camping in! We live out in the sticks and decided to host it at our place instead of renting a cabin or going to a hotel. It worked wonderfully. As you may have seen in previous post, I spray painted twister in my yard. Then I decided races would be more fun if there were start and finish lines. Well, if you're going to paint the yard anyways, why not make a center line for tug of war! I found some soft rope and had the girls line up with the tallest girls on the outside and the shortest ones on the inside and split them into two teams from there. We did the ready, set, go and watched them tug each other around. Most of the girls enjoyed this, although I do have a few that don't much like anything physical.

 I wanted some team building activities (and to wear them out so we would get some sleep). So next we tried the 3 legged race. I am fortunate to have horses, so we had plenty of nice feed sacks to use. I prefer this way to tying them together because if they fall they can get up with less likelihood of hurting each other. This was great fun, but I found out I have some sore losers. It was great at team building though. They HAVE to work together to win.

We also did a good old sack race. Very entertaining for all involved :)

 Dinner was cooked over the coals by the girls. We used pie irons and filled them with bread, pizza sauce, cheese, and pepperoni, Yummy! I think everyone liked these quite well. I let them assemble their own and they got to chose what went on there (I also had peppers, onions, mushrooms and olives but none of them were used:). A little later we roasted marshmallows and made smores.

We played outside until dark. I had a few really wanting to go inside, but since this is the preparation for camping out I kept them out until dark. Once inside they laid out their sleeping bags on the floor and settled down for some movies and popcorn. They made it through 2 movies and then all crashed. A very successful Camping In!

Yard Twister!!!

We are having the girls sleep over this Friday for their "Camping In" which is required in order to "Camp Out" (which they REALLY want to do). I decided to make a Twister game in my yard!

I bought paint in the appropriate colors.

I cut a circle in a cookie box and used a stick to keep them kinda straight.

It took maybe 10 minutes (including shaking the paint cans). We had a hard rain about an hour after I got done. It was still there and nice and bright this morning. I had heard that you would have to wait for the grass to grow and cut it off.

Now we have a nice Twister board in our yard and plenty of paint to do it again sometime. I may also keep the box with the circle in it (it worked so well:).
I have an iPhone and found a free app called "TwisterCmdr". It looks like it will work good.
Wish me luck!!

Rope Climb/Swing

We hung a rope from a tree in our yard with the intention of our 8 year old daughter climbing it. We put several knots in in it so she could get a good grip and got her some gloves to avoid rope burn. This is what she does with it!!

I guess this is one of those instances where you just gotta go with the flow. She is still getting an upper body workout, just not in the manner I expected (school gym teacher said the children did not have the upper body strength that they should have).

I'd be very interested in ideas for at home obstacle courses. We are always trying to come up with fun ways to excercise.