Ways to Enjoy the 2012 Olympics with Your Family

Guest post from Jackie Bledsoe

Tomorrow is the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.  Every four years I look forward to the Summer Olympics when it comes.  I love to watch as much of it and as many of the different competitions as possible.  I watch everything!

It inspires and amazes me to watch athletes perform at the world’s highest level.  I love learning about what it took for them to get their and appreciate their hard work and dedication.

Redesign of Kids Country Playground in Coppell

Kids Country - Coppell Texas

A Childhood Memory Revisited

by Drew Davis

My fondest Olympic memory is of the ‘84 games.  Even though I was just 8 years old, I vividly remember the way our neighborhood ‘70s-style metal playground was hastily transformed into an Olympic venue.  Our Olympians, the teenage boys in the neighborhood, invented events and rules as they went along.  The event most likely to be featured on a box of Wheaties was the way they used the momentum of the swing to kick off a shoe.  The champion’s shoe made it all the way to the slide (an Olympic record that still stands)!  A few years later, a new wooden playground was put in where everything was connected to a two story wooden structure (a precursor of the playgrounds of today) we had entered a new era!!!

The magic of my playground memories in no way prepared me for my first encounter with Kids Country in Coppell.  It is a sprawling wooden castle with bridges and turrets galore; there’s even an amphitheater.  Ancient looking Oak trees provide a roof that covers the vast majority of the area.  As I looked on incomprehensibly, I realized there was something I had lost sight of: my four year old son.

Using Memory Lists to Remember Your Summer Vacation

One of my favorite blogs that I follow is KimandJason.com. Their whole life is about escaping adultitis and putting more fun into your life with your family. Jason gave me permission to share this great post about using Memory Lists to remember your summer vacation, freeing you to enjoy the moment more! I hope you enjoy this guest post as much as I did!

Memory Lists: The Simplest Way to Remember Your Vacation Forever

Kim and I are all about collecting experiences over stuff. The challenge with experiences is that they are fleeting. Which is why we normally try to make them tangible in some way, in order to relive them again and again.

Some common methods for “tangibilizing” memories are taking photos, shooting video, scrapbooking, and journaling. These are each excellent in their own way, but they also have downsides. With photos and video, you can easily spend more time looking through a camera’s viewfinder than actually enjoying the experience firsthand. And others require a lot of post-event work that doesn’t always get done, as is the case with video editing, scrapbooking and journaling.