Summertime Fun

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Here in the UK we are subjected to 6 whole weeks of having our children at home with us during summer, before the new school year starts again in September.

Don't get me wrong, I love my children and wouldn't be without them.

But 6 weeks???

Sometimes it can be a little bit like hell on earth with all of the fighting and arguing that happens.

Not to mention expensive!!

It seems that almost everywhere you want to go has a price tag attached to it which, when you are multiplying it by 8 (2 adults & 6 children), can be rather pricey to say the least.

So, the challenge for this summer is to try and find as many cheap/free activities to do as possible.

Obviously we will still do some days out where we have to pay, for example:, next week Daddy D is home with us for the week so will will be doing things like going to the safari park, bowling, swimming, etc.

But it would be great if we could get through the summer holidays without bankrupting ourselves.

We are into our second week of the holidays and have made good use of the obvious activities such as arts and crafts, colouring in, playing in the garden, going to the local park and we have even made home-made play-dough.

Now, this is where the challenge starts to become a little more tricky.

There are only so many times you can break out the paints and the colouring pencils to keep the children busy.

Last night we did something completely different and the children absolutely loved it.

I borrowed a tent from my sister and we camped out in the back garden!

Camping is something we have been thinking about for a little while now, but I wanted to see how the children coped with sleeping in a tent before we dragged ourselves to a camp-site miles away from home, only to discover that they were terrified/wouldn't sleep etc.

Needing summer holiday activities to do gave us the perfect opportunity to test it out.

We decided that it would be best to just camp out there with the older 4 children this time, so Daddy D stayed in the house with the 2 little ones and I had the pleasure of being in the tent with 4 rather excited little monsters.

We put on our onesies .........

........... dragged a couple of mattresses and the duvets into the tent from the children's beds, put a movie on the laptop for them to watch, grabbed some snacks and bedded in for the night.

There was a little bit of fighting and arguing, as usual, and it was a little bit chilly during the night, but other than that our camp out was a big success.

All of the children were asleep by 11pm and they slept right through until 8am this morning.

We even had some super yummy waffles for breakfast.

If you are looking for something different to do then I would definitely recommend a back yard camp out. It was great fun.

As the children enjoyed it so much I am now researching family friendly camp-sites and (very large) tents so that we can go camping in Cornwall next summer.

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer?

What activities have you done so far?

I would love it if you shared some of your summer holiday survival tips and activity ideas with us.

Missy x

About Missy B

Marissa Bird

Marissa Bird is a busy mum of six, blogging the realities of parenting, whilst trying to keep her sanity by reading books and taking photographs in her spare time... if she can ever find any!

Summertime Fun

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