Winter is Over! (Bucket List Update)

OK, so this is going to be the last Winter Bucket List update because today is the last day of winter!! We didn't get everything finished, as a matter of fact 5 things on the list didn't get completed. Which took our list from 25 to 20 items, which is OK with me since that's what I usually confine our lists to is 20 items. 

We did check off a few things this past weekend to get to that magical number 20.

We had the children cook day (#13) on Sunday. We allowed each camper to decide which meal they'd like to cook and what they'd like to make. YCJ made oatmeal for everyone for breakfast. She started with the kids oatmeal and then made Mom and Dad's. ECJ made lunch but I seem to have missed taking a picture of it, he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids and buttered rice for the parents. Peanut chose to make dinner (I know, right?!?!) and wanted to make soup and crackers. So, she put her apron on (with a little help) and made chicken noodle soup for the kiddos and cream of mushroom soup for the adults. We're all very proud of her!

ECJ chose to make our board game (#24) after getting some ideas from the rest of us. There are over 30 trivia cards, over sixty individual spaces on the game board, four "movers", and it's set up a lot to look like the shape of the Candy Land board game but works to where all three children have questions they can answer in equal amounts. He even made some of the questions educational ones!

 We made leprechaun traps (#17). We made these pretty simply but with rainbow colored Popsicle sticks to "attract" the leprechauns to our traps. We're still not sure if we caught any real ones though because those are tricky critters! They vanish if you don't keep an eye on them once their caught and since the traps all closed during the night if there were any leprechauns inside of them (besides the pictures we placed there as bait) they vanished by the time we woke up in the morning... Oh well, we'll try again next year!

We finally got around to making our chalk pastel winter scenes (#12), just a few days before the first day of spring! These turned out pretty well for just using sidewalk chalk we still had hanging around. I really do need to invest in some "real" chalk pastels before next school year.

And we even made our fire starters (#18). We've made some like this before but I'd never thought of the teachable moments before and there will be a full step by step on how to make these next week. The kids had a ton of fun making them and now we have three small jars of six fire starters each, so enough to start 18 fires with!

We managed to all say our rosaries every day, read a book a month as a family, and to do our Mailbox Monday's faithfully.

We did not manage to make our simple sock snowmen (due to running out of time), complete one craft/project each (Daddy did his but the rest of us didn't finish ours yet), begin seeds indoors (though we'll do that in a month or two), partially or finish remodeling either child's room that's left (those were listed separately). We have begun on one of the room remodels but aren't counting that towards the list though we've gone quite a way with it already in the past couple of days, and I will be posting about the room remodels at a later date.

We had fun with our Winter bucket list but won't be doing one for the spring. We have so much on our plates already for this spring time that although I could use them as items for the list it just doesn't seem like the thing to do. We have our Lenten commitments to take care of, the front portion of the house to complete, the Cracker Jack's first communions, the projects that we haven't finished, and much more already on a "to do" list. We'll probably be participating in a summer fun list this year, but we won't be hosting one by any means. 

I hope you've enjoyed seeing our little progress reports on the little things we've been doing this winter! We had fun sharing them with you! Perhaps, next winter we'll do a winter link up again... But, I'm NOT ready to think about next winter just yet!

Find us on Facebook here or subscribe to the blog for tips on homeschooling, book reviews, how to get your children helping out in the kitchen, and to see many pictures of the cute kiddos, plus much more!