The thing I love most about children in general, is that for the most part they are easy to please, especially when it comes to vacation activities. Show them some sun, some water, an amusement park, summertime food, and they’re pretty happy. They’re not too picky on how they get there, as long as they get there. They may complain a little about travel time, however, if you keep the anticipation up, they can’t help but squeal in their pants.

Here are 5 family vacation activities that your kids will love:

1. At-home Water Park: As much as we’d like, we can’t get away to a water park every weekend of the summer. So why not create a water park at-home? Most of your major “everything” stores such as Target, Walmart, and Kmart sell water slides. Buy a couple of those bad boys, hook them up to your water hose, invite a couple of your child’s buddies, and watch your home turn into the local water park. If you’re one of the lucky souls to already have a pool in the backyard, that’s even better! Fire up the grill, turn on some music, throw some water toys into the pool with your kids and their invited guests and watch their faces light up. You will instantly be “Cool Mom of the Week” and your house will be known as party central.
2. Themed Day Trips: Kids love to role play. Try dressing them up according to the theme of the day trip you’re embarking on and take their day trip to a whole other level. For example, take a wilderness walk/hike or a trip to nearby caves or caverns. Have your child pretend to be an explorer, complete with an Indiana Jones inspired hat. Dress them up like a farmer and visit a local fruit and vegetable farm that allows you to pick your own produce. If your child loves racecars, dress them up like a racecar driver and have fun with Go Karts or take a trip to a race. If you’re looking for something even more educational, take your kids to a nearby battlefield and give them a history lesson, complete with some sort of military inspired paraphernalia..
3. Weekend Trip to an Outdoor/Indoor Water park: So If you’re really not interested in the hassle of set up and clean up and you have the funds to make it happen, take an overnight trip or a weekend trip to a local water park. If you’re lucky enough to live near Orlando, FL or Williamsburg, VA (or any other location fairly close to a Great Wolf Lodge), you can enjoy both worlds – indoor and outdoor water fun. Near the Williamsburg area, you can visit Bush Gardens or Water Country USA and then hop on over to Great Wolf Lodge for your accommodations and continued water park madness.
4. Annual Family Cruise:  Cruising is by far one of my favorite ways to travel and enjoy family vacation time. Everything is right at your finger tips: water fun, entertainment, restaurants, childcare, and photographers. All you have to do is get to the ship. Theme-cruises such as Disney Cruises probably top the list of fun cruise ships as they have the most child-friendly offerings. However, many cruise lines have programs designed for kids and chaperones to help tailor the fun.
5. Packing party: To ease some of the stress from mom’s shoulder, try having a family packing party complete with music, pizza, and other treats. Packing becomes a fun family affair where the whole family packs their suitcases together and prepares for an upcoming family vacation. This exercise teaches kids at an early age that they too are part of the vacation preparation process.  When they are older, they’ll be better equipped to independently pack because you’ve already made it a family tradition. This takes the stress off of mom and makes packing a family event.

If you are looking for more fun family vacation activities, check out ideas posted by other moms on Twitter Moms at:  http://www.twittermoms.com/forum/topics/share-5-fun-family-vacation. Happy Travels.

Disclaimer: I wrote this blog post while participating in the Williamsburg Tourism and TwitterMoms blogging program for a chance to get a $50 gift card. For more information on how you can participate, click here.

Okay, okay, so we didn’t move from our physical home but we did move from our virtual one. Finally! And it actually wasn’t that painful. We are saying a teary-eyed bye-bye to the wordpress.com site and moving on up to our own. We just needed to spread our wings more. So come visit us at http://momsguidetotravel.com. The name of the blog is changing as well. It will now be called Mom’s Guide to Travel with Kids.

So, come on and join us. Pack up your things and let’s go!

Tawanna

You can listen to the full Interview with Stepp Stewart here and check out the article on the Examiner.

Either way, the night will prove to be very entertaining.

In the meantime, I’m:
- Planning my outfits
- Packing pajamas or clothes
- Preparing meals & snacks
- Writing To Do/To Pack lists
- Calculating departure time
- Calculating how much time we have to get ready
- Reinforcing rules
- And just overall being strategic so that we’re either a.) on time or b.) don’t forget anything

Unless the kids are staying @ home w/ a sitter, sometimes I feel it’s less work to just take them.

Maybe that’s why we don’t get out much!

Sometimes we believe the more we travel or the further we travel, the cooler we are. The funny thing about that is, kids don’t care. You can create the same experience you travel and paid for, right in your immediate environment. All it takes is fun and imagination. That’s all they really want – is to have fun with their parents and use their imagination. Who needs a car, train or plane for that?

One of the first things I normally do when I’m planning a short family excursion is to check the weather forecast for my current location and my destination.

This weekend, as I laboriously planned our ski day trip to Pennsylvania, figuring out who would take the two-year old on the kiddy snowtubing slope and who would drop the six-year-old off at ski camp before heading for some private slope time, I mindlessly forgot to check the weather. Saturday was a beautiful, unseasonably warm January day, ripe for any winter sport your heart could desire. I chose to run errands  and do some shopping, taking for granted that winter days are as fickle as old-timers.

If I completed one simple task on my list, I would’ve postponed the shopping for my choice of one of the two subsequent rainy days of the long weekend.  It made all the difference for our trip – we didn’t go on it! And in a military household where “ya just never know”, wasted days are like throwing money away – you can not afford it. The experience was a lesson learned in sticking to my travel To Do list – check the weather before you plan anything. You can save yourself a lot of time and disappointment.

2009 was a whirlwind year for us travel wise. My soon to be five-year old truck hit the 100k mark the day before Christmas, a testimony to how many road trips we’ve taken since purchasing it new back in ’05.  Although we’ve made our marks on the map before, this was the first year as a foursome that we’ve gotten to really travel. My one year old definitely got his fair share of road and air time this year.

And I’ve gotten my fair share of the expanses of the family travel world. Through social networking, I’ve discovered a whole mommy blogging/traveling community who are monetizing their family travels and providing great ideas and resources as well.

 Through a domino affect, I’ve met other mompreneurs who are making it happen in other areas of business while balancing their home life. A departure from my norm, I wanted to share an interview I conducted with one such mompreneur. Chandra Clarke, owner of Scribendi.com, coined the term “power mommy”.  Learning about her journey and her business has been useful and encouraging and I hope that maybe it will be useful to all my mompreneur readers out there as well. Enjoy!

Q: What inspired you to create this specific business?
Chandra: I started Scribendi.com in order to provide people with much-needed editing and proofreading services. Prior to launching the business, I was a freelance journalist and editor, a job that put me in constant contact with error-laden press releases and story drafts. I knew the market was out there, and I was determined to find a way to fulfill that demand via an online platform.

Q: Though your business is virtually based, do you travel for business and how do you manage to balance it all with a family? Do you have a nanny or consistent sitter?
Chandra: Since my three boys are homeschooled and still quite young, I try to keep my traveling down to a minimum at the moment. When I have to go out of town, my husband and business partner mans the fort both at home and at the office (he’s the Vice-President at Scribendi.com). And I do the same when he leaves town. On those rare occasions when we’re both required to head out of town, my parents live just a short drive away, and they’re always eager to spoil their grandkids for a few days.

Q: What one piece of advice could you give to a mom who is early in the entrepreneur cycle? How long did it take you to actually start making money from your business?

Chandra: We’ve been profitable since I started, mainly because I was careful about what I spent my money on. I see so many businesses that spend a fortune on the trappings of business straight out of the gate – a fabulous office, high-end computers, multi-function business phones. My advice here is that you should consider every purchase very carefully, especially early on, when you have very little capital. Consider whether you need all the bells and whistles, or can do okay, and even grow a little, with something less pricey to start.

 Q: How do you define a Power Mommy? And what does it take to become one?
Chandra: I define a Power Mommy as a Mompreneur who has taken it to the next level; a woman who has moved from the home office to the executive office, all the while caring for her family and herself. It does require a willingness to sacrifice certain things—spare time, sleep, sometimes your sanity, other interests and pursuits. You really have to pare down your life and focus, at least in the short-term. For example, you’re not going to be able to fit in the piano class, the photography course, and a complete house renovation while also trying to build a big business, raise happy, well-adjusted children, and have a strong marriage. Be patient! You can have it all—just not necessarily all at once!

Right now, I’d actually like to be on a beach . By myself. No husband, no kids, no responsibilities. All I’d like is my bathing suit, my phone and my computer.

As much as I love taking my kids to new places, there are times when a mom just needs to be a woman and nothing else. I feel like men get to lose the “father” branding a lot easier than women get to lose the “mom” branding.

My husband’s current trip, a 5-week training course on the other side of the country, stifles any possibility of me having that much-needed Me-time. It’s times like these where I daydream about being alone on that warm, tropical beach up above. In Belize. In solitude. I’d probably still write about how and where I travel with my kids. I just wouldn’t be doing it at that particular time. Hey, everybody needs a minute. Especially moms!

I’m having a learning moment here: Parents can’t truly appreciate traveling with their kids unless they get some time to travel with just themselves.

The change in environment, introduction of new germs, lack of sleep, change in diet, exposure to more people are all leading factors to why we tend to get sick when we come off of a trip. I’d say the main factor is pure lack of sleep. It happens to me everytime. I go away, I’m pumped and excited to be somewhere other than the “4 walls” of my house, I stay up later watching t.v. that I don’t normally watch at home (although I get the same programming), and before you know it, “kachoo”, the first sneeze and accompanying sniffle make their way to the surface. Apparently it isn’t enough that I take Clorox cloths and wipe down various surfaces in the hotel room or that I travel with my own washcloth and sometimes my own towel or that I wear slippers in the room or flip flops in the shower or line the bathroom seat with paper. No, that’s not enough. Somehow, someway those sneaky bastard germs make their way through all of my other protective barriers and catch me through that one little crack…sleep.

Bottom line: I need to take better care of myself when traveling with my children. I make sure that they are in bed on time and that they’ve taken their necessary vitamins. I even try to maintain my workout schedule when I’m away from home. It’s just a challenge for me to wind down and go to sleep at a human hour…kind of like now. I was lucky this time around, getting over my sickness in a few days but it took discipline to do so. I went to bed before 11pm most nights this week; I didn’t workout before 6 am in the morning; I took either Nyquil or TheraFlu to have uninterrupted slumber; I drank 3-4 packets of Emergen-C a day coupled with double shots of vitamin C chewables; and I napped in the day, whenever my body wanted to say “nighty night”. I didn’t fight it.

Moral of the story: Go to bed! You’ll do your body good. Everything that’s there now will be there tomorrow. Traveling can be exciting and we may try to cram as much as possible into our schedules so that we don’t “miss anything” but what’s the sense in going away on mini-breaks or vacations if you come back sicker than when you left? None whatsoever.

So, on that note: Good Night.

Us moms in particular preoccupy ourselves all too often with ensuring our kids’ happiness or what we think would make them happy sometimes to our own detriment. Yesterday was my oldest son’s first homecoming game for football and the days leading up to them were difficult for me as I struggled with the decision of staying to allow him to go to the game or hitting the road with he and his brother instead. We had an engagement to attend the following day which required me driving 4 hours away – that’s 4 hours without traffic (it actually took me almost 5). I had actually considered going to the 8pm homecoming, getting up early the next morning, hitting the road, and making it to our destination in time for the event. But then I thought about me being on the road with the kids by myself not feeling totally rested and probably slightly stressed and I reconsidered my options. The only option was to forego the game, pick my oldest up early from school, and get ahead of the I-95 Friday afternoon traffic. Nobody wants to be stuck in that with a 1 year old and a 5 year old. And I wasn’t. I had definitely made the right choice.

My son asked me while we were on the road if we were going to make his football game, a question I was dreading because I didn’t want to hear he disappointment in his voice. The excitement of traveling and my choreographed explanation dispelled any anger that he may have harbored and I was relieved of my fears to ensure his happiness for that day.