Summer Blog Challenge: Travel and Plans for the Summer

I have actually mentioned it quite a bit on here but this is the prompt for today so here's more of it :)
Plans for the summer will be squeezed in when it can but special events have kind of taken over this year. Out of state family visitors, weddings, big number birthdays, baby showers, babies arriving while working does not leave much room for planning out vacations for ourselves. However, we will definitely be utilizing the beautiful scenes around us. Luckily I live in a great spot where a little bit of travel can get us to a variety of places. In about an hour and a half, in different directions, we can be at some fantastic waterfalls, a beautiful rocky beach with an amusement park or hiking a breathtaking mountain.
This is why I love Maine, especially in the summer. So even though I have no concrete plans, we are going to be busier then ever this year and will see just a little more of our 'backyard' .
What plans do you have?

Sparkler art, glow balloons.....extremely cheap and fun!

It has been hot out lately... I mean, really hot. Summer sure did start off with a bang didn't it? With all this heat, the motivation for house cleaning is not really there. We've taken a little bit of a break and decided to have some fun. This night of fun for the family cost $6.20 in all and the kids had a blast. I have known about sparkler art for a while but finally got to try it out with the boys. Sparkler art is when you put your camera on a slow shutter speed and take a picture of someone drawing something with a lit sparkler. I found that on my canon point and shoot that the firework setting worked fine. This was part of the Gamer's art. He wrote his name out and it came out great. Here is his O :) Pretty cool huh? He sure thought it was!

Spaz loved the pictures but being true to his nickname he was too spastic to do something other than wiggling really fast. Either way, he was extremely happy with his art as well.

Lil Riot caught on really quickly and jumped right into making letters. He did like wiggling around too which made the sparklers look like fireworks. Here is his O. For a 4 year old that is pretty darn good!

For $1 you can try this out too. Just grab some sparklers and if it's just you, put your camera on a tripod, make sure your shutter speed is slow and put a self timer on. Get in place and draw away. Lots of people like to do hearts around them and their other half or something cute like that. Just google sparkler art and see all the creative things you can do.

The other activity we did was to get glow sticks (we got the cans with 15 of them in it at the dollar store) and we put them in balloons and blew them up. Although it didn't turn out quite the way I thought, they still were kind of cool and the boys definite had fun finding the balloons glowing in the tall grass and popping them. We also got the spinning glow stick toy but if you come across these... the glow sticks themselves are better and shorter ...great for the balloons but the spinning part is a joke and does not work well at all.

What cheap and fun activities have you done for summer so far? I would love it if you shared with us!

Stretch you dollar just a little bit farther..

For the last couple of summers, I have been gathering information on great family friendly places that are somewhat local and not a lot of money. Since my family is not able to do formal family vacations in this economy right now, finding great hot spots and stretching the dollar is super important to me. Not to mention, they are always great to fall back on in a pinch.

Thanks to great inspiration and resources online, I can really utilize my creativity and save even more money on everyday purchases so that we can fit in more fun activities throughout the year. Summer is the time for family outings, holidays, weddings, birthdays, special events and tons more. I personally have 2 weddings, a 1st year birthday party, a very special baby shower, 2 more out of state family members coming along with the typical holiday events all coming up in just July. Without a great job this is quite stressful to even think of! So what am I going to do?

Well, first off I am going to be 'pinning' things like crazy and doing a lot of home made gifts. Bleach designing onsies and baby bags, adding fun things to old items to make them new.. like doing the coolest monster patches on blown out knees to revive my boys' jeans or adding appliques to old backpacks for school in the fall. I will be hitting the great second hand shops we have locally to save on summer clothes and using coupon and promo code sites such as promotioncode.org. This is a great tool to help me save even more money when I want to find the gifts for all these upcoming events or even the materials to make them. They do all the work for you and have all your promos ready in one spot.

What frugal ideas to you have to share? Be sure to check for upcoming linkies that share what we all have to offer. Next up is how to turn a canvas drop cloth into drapes. I hope your summer starts off with a blast being tons of fun and saving you cash!!