Ultimate Family Fun: Hometown Ice Cream Tour

We’ve had some pretty major changes in the past five months, and while they have all slowly led to an amazing and exciting place, they have had the expected emotional fall-out with Ella.

While she is excited about all of the wonderful changes, she’s also having completely developmentally-appropriate anxiety and apprehension.

We’ve been talking, cuddling, and generally trying to restore her emotional “well,” and part of that has been seeking out some family fun.

When we were in Chicago, we conducted our own “cupcake tour” of the city, visiting over 10 different bakeries, and trying even more cupcakes! Ella was even featured on a local cupcake shop’s Facebook page! I think part of why I love vacations (and why most people love vacations) is not just the break from the everyday, but the quest for fun, and often, the complete abandon of obligation.

And thus, our hometown ice cream tour was born! This week, we hit up some of the best ice cream shops here in our hometown, along with some of our favourite places to sit back and enjoy a cone, and I think this is now merging into a two week project.

Getting out of the house and just looking for cheap, delicious fun has been so rewarding, and it has been such a wonderful reminder to re-prioritize family fun. I can be really guilty of setting up fun or educational activities for the kids, and focusing on everything running smoothly, or thinking the whole time about all of the million things that I need to get done during that day’s nap! (Can anyone out there relate?)

I’ve decided to compile a small bucket-list of family fun ideas to remind me to let loose and have fun — and yes, while a list would feel like pressure to a lot of people, for me it’s a good type of pressure to prioritize fun and put down my OTHER to-do lists for awhile.

My criteria for our summer fun bucket list:

• easy or no preparation or clean-up
• no alterior motives (learning, etc)
• a couple of candid pictures and that’s it!
• wear “fun-making” clothes so we can get messy and dirty without care
• only non-competitive friends can join