Back in April, when everything was shut down and we were sheltering in place, my children and I went on an adventure. This was my daughter’s first year in school and her Spring Break week was approaching. We normally wouldn’t go on any lavish vacation or anything, but I always try to make it special. I knew there wasn’t much that we could do so I asked my daughter, “Where do you want to go?”.
Let me jump back a second and let you know about our little family. I have always been the type of person that is active and out and about. We’ve been gifted memberships to local attractions, we frequent all of the free things to do in the area, and every weekend we are at some type of festival, party, or cultural event going on. So for us, staying home has been….difficult. Lucky for us, we have a great imagination.
My 4.5 year old made her list. She decided she wanted to go to France and visit the beach there, go to London and get our nails done and put cucumbers on her eyes, she wanted to go to outer space to see aliens, camp in the woods to earn badges, and lastly, she wanted to explore the jungle and turn into tigers. You know, small requests…🤣
I started to brain storm and use those moments at night, when I’d lay awake and couldn’t help but think about the uncertainty going on. That’s when I would try to distract myself and plan our adventure for the next day. Everything that we used or made was from things we already had available at home. I did not make any special trips or buy anything special to create our adventure.
On the first day of Spring Break, we began our travels on the French Riviera. 🇫🇷 We cooled off for a few wearing our bathing suits and watching videos of the beaches in France. Just lay out a towel in the living room, grab your sunnies and relax!
For breakfast, we made homemade crepes and whipped cream. We filled our crepes with bananas, strawberries and chocolate (nut allergy here, so no Nutella).
After breakfast we watched the movie Leap! It’s one of my daughter’s favorites. Then, we changed into our chicest “French attire”. 😉
For lunch, we ate yogurt parfaits and ham and cheese crepes since I made way too many crepes at breakfast.
My daughter had the idea to create a passport to mark each of her travels. This one we just threw together, but it was fun. I glued a picture of her on it and each day we put a stamp on the page where we went.
Later on we explored Paris. I quickly sketched a picture of the Eiffel Tower, nothing fancy. But it gave it that Parisian feel.
There we saw the Eiffel Tower and shopped the Champs-Élysees for summer clothes. This was fun because I actually needed her Summer clothes put up from winter storage and I got her to do it that way. Haha! We basically just put her summer clothes around the house and she would put in bags and then we hung them up in her closet.
For dinner, I made a quiche Lorraine and dessert was chocolate inside crescent rolls. C’est Magnifique!
On Tuesday, we hopped on over to London. 🇬🇧 We made sure to stamp our passport and then saw Big Ben. I did a quick sketch of the clock and skyline with a double decker bus to put on the wall.
My daughter wore her favorite tea party dress that was covered in tea pots and we put on big hats for our High Tea. I made a bunch of little tea sandwiches which included simple things like turkey and cheese, pb&j, tuna salad, and cucumber sandwiches with a delicious dill cream cheese.
I made chocolate chip scones and even had a go at making nut free macarons (yes, they are technically French, but we were there yesterday and they go well with high tea).
Later, we made royal crowns to wear out of construction paper and gold stickers just like British royalty.
Later on, we went to an outdoor spa where I had a homemade honey and yogurt mask. The person doing my facial sure had fun painting it all over my face! We also put cucumbers on our eyes, as required on her itinerary.
The jet lag must have caught up to my daughter because she actually napped while watching Frozen 2 afterwards. That never happens. Per request, she got her nails done and gave us both a makeup makeover… That sure was a look! 😳She definitely had fun with the mascara, lipgloss, and eye liner.
For dinner, we had “fish n chips” with some authentic malt vinegar! It was finally time to say “cheerio” to London.
On Wednesday, our adventure took us to outer space! 🚀🌌 We found an alien zooming through the galaxy by coloring our own outer space picture for the wall to get into an intergalactic mood.
We then made some lime green alien slime with glue, glitter, baking soda, gel food coloring and contact solution.
Later, we got a little silly making alien faces with our chins. I remembered how we used to draw faces on our chins as kids and lay upside down, so I had to show my daughter and we definitely had fun with it.
We even made little alien eye head bands!
Then we turned all the lights out and played in the dark and looked at the stars, while we watched Wall-E on the tv.
Afterwards, we made some marshmallow constellations, ate some Alien chocolate covered pretzels.
The we made a UFO with paper plates and a plastic container and created a telescope with a paper towel roll.
I created a fun galaxy egg hunt outside from the hand painted galaxy eggs we made a few years ago.
For our silly extraterrestrial dinner, I stuck hard spaghetti through meatballs and boiled them in green colored water. It looked so weird.
For dessert, I tried yummy homemade moon pies. 👩🚀 It truly was out of this world!
On Thursday, our Spring Break adventure was to go camping! ⛺️Since my camping stuff is in storage and we can’t go anywhere, we had to improvise. We got out the camping chairs and cooler and set up my kids indoor tent and sleeping bag.
We “camped” at a beautiful spot with mountains, river and waterfall right at our campsite. I created a river with blue painters tape across her room. Then we hung blue streamers with cotton balls at the bottom. I added brown craft paper rolled up to look like logs or vines around the river. I also found some fun vine looking ribbon/string that worked great to throw in a fake plant. We also made a fireplace with paper towel rolls and tissue paper with crumpled up black construction paper. We of course drew a picture of our scenic view from the campsite as well.
We enjoyed a hike to the river (small creek in neighborhood) where we made our own fishing pole with string and a key.
I worked on teaching her how to skip rocks and that it was ok to get wet or fall, and we did!
We made sure to keep our energy up with the trail mix we created. We just took cereal, chocolate chips, marshmallows, Chex mix, m&m’s, pretzels, Kix, peanuts, and dried cranberries in a baggie.
It ended up being quite windy that day, so later on my daughter flew her first kite.
She actually made her own sash to earn badges and put them on! We just cut out paper circles to make the badges. These badges included fishing, flying a kite, hiking, camping and sewing.
Since it was too windy earlier in the day, we had to wait to use the real campfire until dessert time for some s’mores! And before bedtime, she had required that we sit around the fire and sing songs and tell ghost stories. I can’t wait to take her out camping again, but for real!
Our week went by so fast! We visited France, London, Outer Space, and camped in the deep woods. On our last day, we visited a jungle with lots of tigers in Indonesia🐯.
We started our day wearing our favorite animal prints and did a “jungle breakfast”. We did these in Girl Scouts as a kid. Adults tie the food up in trees and kids have to get down what they want.
My daughter’s request was to do tiger face paint when we visit the jungle, so she became a tiger and turned me into one too. 😳
We made binoculars out of toilet paper rolls to use on our tiger tour. We searched and searched but no tigers in sight.
Later, I made the hallway turn into the thick jungle forest filled with vines and they had to make their way through it.
We then made a rain stick to listen to the sound of the rain from the jungle. We used a paper towel roll, foil, and rice.
What a great way to end our adventurous spring break that we will never forget.
While this pandemic has caused stress of being “stuck” at home, this time has also really given me and my daughter the ability to reconnect. It’s been kind of a difficult year for us with moving in with my parents. And, I know our relationship has really struggled since the birth of her brother. Over spring break, I actually heard her say things like “you look so happy, mommy!” And “this is the best day ever!” ❤️ All the hard work was worth it. It truly was the best Spring Break, ever!
Just a little creativity and imagination can go a long way.
Creations of an Imperfect Mom 