February is a great time to make snowmen and drink hot chocolate start thinking about summer camp. Dulles Town Center is hosting a summer camp and activities fair on Saturday February 26 and Sunday February 27, 2011. It’s a perfect opportunity for those who wish to meet representatives from many local camps at once.

If you like to do your researching online, here are a few local options to check out:

YMCA Summer Camp

My six year-old tried a week of nature day camp at Camp Highroad last August and he loved it. I signed him up thinking a full day camp experience might be helpful in the transition to first grade, and he came home completely exhausted and missing some item he had taken with him (lunch box, socks, towel, etc.) every day. I’m not sure I’ll send him again, but he can’t wait to go back. They offer before and after care, which allows for working parents to drop off and pick up without taking time away from the office.

Audubon Society Nature Camps

The Audubon Nature Society (ANS) is my go-to source for nature-based early education in the DC Metro area. They offer camps at the Broadlands Nature Center in Ashburn, the Rust Nature Sanctuary in Leesburg, and the Woodend Nature Sanctuary in Chevy Chase, MD. Both my kids enjoyed first camp experiences at the Rust Nature Sanctuary in Leesburg. The camps are small enough to be intimate, true to ANS’ mission of connecting people with nature in the DC Region, are lots of fun, and manage to stay low key enough not to overstimulate and exhaust the average child to the point of meltdown. To preview the ANS style of working with kids, I encourage you to stop by their annual Spring Nature Fair.

Vacation Bible School (VBS)

I know very little about the many vacation bible school options, but from what I hear the local churches often offer summer camps quite cheaply, so if budget and/or faith are a top priority, VBS might be a fit for your family. The following churches have offered vacation bible schools in past years. You can check their websites for 2011 information as summer approaches.

• Ashburn Presbyterian
• Bethel Presbyterian (Leesburg)
• Blueridge Bible Church (Purcellville)
• Cornerstone Chapel, (Leesburg)
• Hamilton Baptist Church
• Loudoun Bible Church (Ashburn)
• Our Saviour’s Way Lutheran Church (Ashburn)
• Purcellville Baptist Church
• St. Francis deSales Catholic Church (Purcellville)
• St. James Episcopal (Leesburg)

There are many other options!

• C3 Cyber Club (Ashburn)
• Destiny Preschool for the Arts (Leesburg)
• Ida Lee Summer Camp (Leesburg)
• Loudoun County (guide available online 3/4/2011 includes camps @ Douglass and Claude Moore)
• Red Gate Farm (Hamilton)
• Sportrock (Sterling, ages 9+)

You can also search the American Camp Association database of ACA accredited camps if you are looking for camps for a specific activity or age group.

Please don’t hesitate to use the comments feature to share your Loudoun County area camp offerings or camp experiences. The more local families who post, the better this resource becomes for all of us!

This time of year my daycare friends always love playing this game. Luckily I do not have to remember the words or melody. I just watch the YouTube video that morning and I am set! (How ever did we manage before YouTube?)

There’s not enough snow for sledding or snowmen this morning, but there is enough for snow painting. You can find detailed instructions elsewhere online, but our version is much simpler:

• Send child outside with paint and brush.
• Watch from comfy chair just inside the door.
• Remove gloves BEFORE the kid comes back inside.

Have fun!

I put a lot of thought into how to celebrate tomorrow’s inauguration with my kids. We debated for months about whether going into DC to experience the excitement of the crowd would be monumental or miserable, and finally the thought of the potty to people ratio and the possibility of changing pull-ups in the cold made the decision to stay home seem most reasonable. Instead, we’ve invited some friends over to commemorate the event.

Below are a couple games we’ll be playing tomorrow with at our Inauguration Day play date.

Pin the Presidential Seal on Obama

Supplies:

• picture of Obama — we used a recent Time magazine cover — in conjunction with poster board and creativity
• small printouts of the US Presidential Seal
• painters tape

Crowded Metro Station

Supplies:

• one Hula hoop
• eager kids

The goal of this game is to see how many kids can stand inside a hula hoop. Next, we’ll see if they can walk across the room with the hula hoop at waist level. I am guessing the game will end when the kids start to disagree about alternate uses for the hula hoop…

We kicked off October with a trip to explore my Pennsylvania roots. In addition to quality family time with my really cool aunts, the kids experienced their first touristy weekend in Venango County.

Oil Creek & Titusville Railroad & Caboose Motel may not be worth the 6 hour drive from Northern Virginia on its own (unless you are really into trains), but if you are headed through the region anyway it is definitely a fun stop.

409 S. Perry Street
Titusville, PA (map it)
814–676-1733 (beware busy signals, they seem to have only one line!)

The kids’ favorite things about the train ride:

• seats that can be turned around depending on which direction the train is going.
• buying ice cream when the train stopped (not that we needed to drive all that way and buy $15 tickets for ice cream!)
• leaves flying off the open car (No throwing allowed! We just happened to be around when they escaped…)

My favorite parts:

• pondering the age of the cars
• enjoying the scenery

Tips for your visit

The brochure reminds you to dress for the weather, and it bears repeating. If you travel during the cooler months make sure to bundle up. The station is chilly, and although it was somewhat warmer in the indoor cars, the most fun can be had on the open air car in the back. Burrr!

If you want a healthy lunch pack your own. If not, they have lots of tasty treats in the front car.

Changing a diaper on those old train cars is even less fun than changing a diaper on an airplane without a changing table. Enough said.

We did not try out the motel, but it is definitely a fun idea for a unique family vacation.

We had lots of fun making kick-the-can ice cream at the Rust Nature Sanctuary’s spring Eco Fair a few months ago, and finally drank enough mediocre coffee for a repeat performance at Playschool. I found recipes and instructions at Kaboose.com and dairyspot.com and then co-mingled and finessed them to work with the contents of my refrigerator. The result was definitely worth the two months of reduced quality coffee!

Afterward, we wanted to do it again (and again and again) so I requested large coffee cans on freecycle and found out that very few folks are getting their coffee in large cans around here. In addition to the fact that we live in a fairly well to do county where many folks can afford better coffee, many brands have switched their bulk packaging to plastic. I wiggled my way out of that conundrum by hoofing it to REI in Fairfax to buy The Mega Ball, a plastic contraption designed to replace the coffee can.

The verdict in our unscientific, one run vs one run test is that kick the can ice cream kicks the mega ball’s butt!

Kick the Can Ice Cream tricks and observations:
I bought all the ingredients but the ice at the store. As luck would have it the bulk of the ice cubes in our freezer were made of coffee or contained mint leaves or tang, but we used them anyway.This made the whole production give off a heavenly scent. Our coffee can started to leak coffee ice cubes right away so we covered it with a trash compactor bag. It was still leaking so we covered it with a towel. The towel made it soft which made it safer to send down the slide and push in the swing at the playground. That made us happy. Very happy.  I think the towel also insulated the can a bit and wonder if that helped the ice cream along? Our outer can lid was shredded when we opened the bundle up, and that made it a one use thing — which made us sad given that large coffee cans appear to be headed towards extinction. Our inner can was intact which was quite a relief since a hole would have meant salty (coffee-mint-fake-orange-flavored) ice cream. Our ice cream was the consistency of soft serve and we (6 experienced tasters aged 1 to 30) liked it a lot.

Mega Ball tricks and observations:
The Mega Ball was simpler, but I missed the journey. We didn’t need to wrap it in a towel so it was too hard to safely launch down the slide. The mega ball is one of those funny shaped things that takes a long time to dry on my counter. I like the idea of the Mega Ball and will continue making my kids earn their ice cream with it this summer, but will switch back to kick-the-can after two more months of coffee drinking.

A local mom shared a site with me that could prove useful given all the upcoming summer movie screenings. kids-in-mind.com reviews movies and rates their appropriateness for children. I have looked over the reviews of a few movies we have seen recently and they seem to be accurate and thorough.

Summer Family Movie Screenings:

Regal (throughout the US including Ashburn, Alexandria, Fairfax, Fredericksburg, Manassas, Sterling and many other VA locations) See free movies on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 10am. Show up early to get a seat! Click here for Maryland locations, including Frederick.

Tally Ho (Leesburg, VA) $1 Family Classics on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 11am

Please drop us a line if you are aware of other theaters that have similar programs.

ETA: You can also check your local library for summer movie showings. I know LCPL has some scheduled. 

My 3 year old and I think we discovered the inspiration for Hasbro’s game Elefun. We head to a local trail head at least once a week and read books in the shade while my little one finishes her nap in the car. Sometimes he uses his fish net to try to catch bugs, but now that the leaves are changing and starting to fall he is having much more success catching leaves. He works hard, and giggles and smiles and when the wind stops he begs me to throw the leave so he can catch them. I finally tried it, and it is just as fun as he says. I smile and giggle too.

For the record: I have had a very difficult time finding good nets for my kids. The best I found were at a Sports Authority in Northern Virginia and a Walmart in the mountains of North Carolina. I have done numerous searches online and come up with nothing! I will continue to keep my eye out for extras in order to resell to my readers. Contact me if interested.

Jardinains is not good for adults. Jardinains is not good for kids, but man-oh-man is it fun.

Sometimes on a lazy Sunday afternoon the kids pull up a bench to watch and we bounce garden gnomes up and down and listen to them say “ouch!” When we introduced our 5 year old niece she loved it! When we introduced our twenty something siblings they loved it! When we play in front of our one year old daughter she giggles and shouts and then asks for “more games” when we turn it off.

As a bonus they have a Café Press store where you can buy Jardinain apparel. Good times!

Starfall was recommended to me as tool for preschoolers to practice letters and mouse control at the same time. It is a cool site! I appreciate its simplicity, and my almost four year old son has given it his stamp of approval.