Fancy Nancy

Well we just had a fun vacation in Michigan! Mandy went to Saugatuck last year and convinced everyone to take a chance on the salt-free beaches of lake Michigan. It was beautiful! It looked and felt just like the ocean. The town was cute as were the surrounding towns. One day we went to a Dutch village with a real windmill that had been brought over from Holland. It also had a cool bellows powered pipe symphony thing that was super neat to look at and listen to. The kids had a blast playing with their cousins. They cried last night when they found out we were leaving in the morning.

I’ve been a bit behind on posting because last week before we left I was scrambling to get stuff ready for our drive to Michigan. There were no direct flights to Michigan so we’d either have to take a connection or drive several hours from Chicago. Since we were going to have to rent a car anyway we actually saved a lot of money by driving. Even with the cost of gas, a campsite and treats I bought for the kids we still saved like $900. On the way there we decided to stop at a campsite outside Niagara Falls. We stopped at the falls, had a nice walk along the rapids and rode the Maid of the Mist. Then we went to the campsite to cook dinner and sleep (we used our microcamper of course). Our campsite was on Lake Ontario, and we could see the lake from our site. It was a bit buggy and hot with almost no wind, but luckily right before bed the wind picked up and we had a pleasant sleep.

To keep the kids occupied in the car I put together a bunch of little crafts and activities. Will and I put them into paper bags and we gave them one each hour. The beginning of the journey I gave them out a laminated sheet of license plates and a map of where we were headed so they could track our progress. I also took out a bunch of library books including these cool books they have at the library that read to you (and you can plug in headphones to them). Patricia loves those books because she isn’t a strong reader yet. Julius even enjoyed them because they have fancy narration and music. I didn’t think of doing movies but that would have been a great idea in retrospect.

I bought a bunch of the little crafts on sale from Michaels, put together a few crafts myself and then made a few little toys, combined with some toys that they already had. I also made snackle boxes for each way that had fruits and a watercolor painting cookie which is basically a craft and a snack! We also packed lunches which saved money on our drive. It took me quite a while to prep all that for the drive though, combined with packing the microcamper. I’m still all in on the microcamper. At some point soon I’ll show you the window coverings I made, though I think I might have to upgrade them.

Today I’ll show you how to make a knitting nancy (I guess that’s what they’re called). My grandma gave me one when I was a kid that was in the shape of a mushroom so I call them knitting mushrooms. Julius is about the age I was when I first got one so I made one for him from one of the wooden spools from my grandma and some dowels. He said he loved it and made a 2 foot chain on the way here.