POSTED PHOTOS
(with a brief explanation of what we’re doing.)
Kids just want to connect with someone who is 100% present. You don’t have to spend a fortune.
Your Time is their Greatest Gift!
Just be there and have fun! Let your imagination soar…
BEAUTY SHOP
Pretty Nails and Hair
Little girls LOVE to get the full beauty treatment. Obviously, this can be super simple. Just get some pretty polish and decals and paint their finger and toenails. Then….do their hair. Make it special with ribbons, bows, bangles, headbands, etc. You can even make a cute headband (together) or hair-clip as part of the play-date or even focus your whole play-date around making a lot of these. You can get plenty of ideas for these on places like Pinterest. Buy all supplies ahead of time.
SUPPLIES: A glue gun is a basic necessity with hair clips, ribbons (to make bows) and other ornaments to glue on.
A trip to the local hair-school is another fun thing to do. You can both get a fancy hair-do or mani or pedi at an inexpensive price.
Go do a Photo-Shoot around town and develop the photos instantly at Wal Mart or any where that has the instant developing.
Buy a small scrapbook for your grandchild to keep as a remembrance of this fun date!
LESSONS ON A VARIETY OF THINGS
Riding Lessons
I have a granddaughter who went through a super Horse-Crazy stage. Living in the city, there weren’t a lot of horses to see. I found someone a little ways out of town and arranged for her to get a full-fledged riding lesson. She thought she had died and gone to heaven!
It was not that expensive and we didn’t sign up for an ongoing session
as she didn’t have a horse of her own and this was just an introduction for her to get close and ride and real horse. She loved it! Later on, we went downtown, where there are lots of metal sculptures around town and I let her pose by a pony sculpture. It was a real “Horsey” Day! I found a rustic wooden frame at a thrift store (why pay full-price for something just as good) and blew one of the best photos of her and her horse up to a 9″ X 12″ photo to hang on her wall. This was one Play-Date that was just really perfect for this young lady!
LOCAL RECREATIONAL PLACES
F.U.N. F.R.E.E. Downtown City of St George
Many kudos to the City Planners for the way downtown St George, City Center, has developed! It is a family’s mecca of free and really fun things to do. (Photos Follow)
There is a Splash Pad next to a small, man-made creek encased in faux boulders and waterfalls. In the high summer heat found in this area, kids and families flock here in droves but there’s always room for everyone and never feels overcrowded. Right next to this outdoor water area the city purchased a restored historic carousel. Many complained of the exorbitant price spent on purchasing the carousel but a little research revealed to me that the money was allotted to this part of the city and budgeted for this. This being said, I feel like it is the icing on the cake! I am also amazed that the city is not trying to profit on any of this as the carousel rides cost a mere $1.00. This whole city block contains so many free family activities. The beautiful, new library sits right next to the park and the old highschool, built in the early 1900’s (or earlier) has been turned into the fascinating, free children’s museum. On the opposite corner of this same block is the historic Tabernacle building that boasts free top quality concerts almost every Sunday. This is a clean, happy place with something for everyone. Families love this part of town!
Zion Ponderosa
This was a shared Birthday Play Date. I took two sisters to Zion Ponderosa, a multi-functional camp or rent-a-cabin recreational place on the other side of Zion Canyon. It’s a really popular place to go for families as it has all kinds of fun activities for the kids and grown ups alike. A fun Family Reunion spot. There are two swimming pools, miniature golf, 4-Wheeling, Horse-Back-Rides, a Club Room with lots of games like pool and Ping Pong and a Zip Line.
The day we went here, we played miniature golf and did the zip line…they did the zip line, not me. I think the girls even went swimming in their shorts since we didn’t bring swim suits and it was too hot and too tempting not to get wet!
I’m sure any town has a similar recreational place. If not, no bigee. Stretch out a badminton net or set up a game of lawn croquet. They will love doing something together!
PHOTOS BELOW:
Local Recreational Places
Mountain Man Rendezvous
These are fun, family events that most states hold annually. It is a recreation of a time pre-1800’s where people dress up in clothing from that era, focusing on the mountain men. You see many leather outfits and lots of booths selling items from that time period. There are black powder and tomahawk competitions as well as games specifically geared towards the kids. If you hear of one going on, stop by, they’re really interesting and the kids love them.
NATIONAL, STATE and CITY PARKS
Zion Canyon
Zion Canyon in Southern Utah is visited by over 2 million people per year. No wonder! It is one of the most beautiful National Parks in the country with towering canyon walls and cathedrals of solid stone. We are fortunate enough to live very near this natural phenomenon and have started utilizing more often. Considering that people come from all over the world, we realized how foolish we are not to go see it regularly. When my mother was alive and loved car rides, I would invite the local grand-kids and we would take them with us and drive out to Zion National Park. I will post a great website after this post if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s a free shuttle you can ride throughout the park that stops at all the hiking trail heads and a few other points of interest. This has turned into a really fun destination to take the kids when we have the whole day, like on a week-end. Below are a few photos of our trips there, hiking and riding the shuttle. Now that they are avid bike riders, as well as myself, I need to plan a trip when we all take our bikes on the bike trails next time we go out.
There are SO MANY interesting hiking and camping areas near us. I guess we’re lucky in this respect that we have so many to choose from. Going to any State or National Park would be a super fun play-date or visiting some sort of a museum in your city.
Veyo City Park
Every city, no matter how large or small, seems to have a park. You will be surprised to discover some of these very quaint, unpopulated parks in very small towns. We went to the Veyo park one day, when I had my mother with us, and found a very sweet, old-fashioned park. It even had a big, wooden motor boat the kids could play on as well as lots of huge, mature shade-trees. We had an impromptu picnic of snacks we had brought with us on a drive. Seize the moment. You never know what’s out there and some of our favorite times have been little surprises we stumbled across. That’s part of the adventure.
Kanab City Park
We went to a large, annual event in Kanab, UT a year ago and then took a break from the blistering heat downtown and the crowds and went to the city park to eat our lunch. Little did we know it had undergone a huge renovation and we discovered one of the best, most beautiful parks I’ve seen! It even has a huge swimming area with an up-to-date water park right next to the park. We will definitively be coming back here this coming summer.
Western Legends Round-Up
This is an annual event sponsored each year, in August, by the city of Kanab, UT. Kanab is nick-named “Little Hollywood” as many of the old (and newer) western movies were filmed in this area. The event is really fun to go to with a parade, craft booths set up along two blocks, an old movie theater showing some of the older western movies, a live western “shoot-out”, Cowboy Poetry in the Big Barn located right there and lots of other events. We try to go to this every year and often will take some grand-kids with us.
Neighborhood Parks
MUSEUMS and ART GALLERIES
Rosenbruch Wildlife Museum
I bought this top for my granddaughter for her birthday to wear at the Wildlife Museum so we could get some cool photos of her (our “photo-shoot” for her tenth birthday.) I also took my grandson, Westin, here on one of his birthdays as well then let him pick out something from the museum gift shop. He chose a set of mini jungle animals in a pouch I think.
City of St George Children’s Museum
DO IT YOURSELF FUN AND GAMES
Even with all the public sites so readily available, sometimes a fun Play-Date is just a spontaneous thing that happens. Whether you set out to go get a frozen yogurt and end up out in the hills on a short hike or see something going on and stop to check it out; you can’t lose. Kids are so easy to please! We make our own fun!
Slide show Contents:
Below are photos of random times with the grand-kids. We used to live by a duck pond and they loved going there to feed the ducks. One Fall, my mother’s leaves fell overnight. They were still green! The grand-kids had a blast “helping” rake up the leaves. Another year my son’s family drove up from Vegas to help my mother with her leaves, which were always a HUGE job.
Sometimes OUR hobbies are of great interest to our grand-kids. My husband has had Racing Homers (pigeons) since he was a kid and we found out our grand-kids were enthralled with these birds. A photo below shows my husband introducing them to a baby pigeon.
FISHING: This made it a natural outing to take my mother and/or grand-kids along once in a while. “The more the merrier.” He is so patient in teaching these young ones the things he has learned. We even built a grandson his very own pigeon loft one year and was going to give him a pair of pigeons. His mom decided against it as she was up to her neck in various obligations, a single parent and decided she didn’t have time to donate to this project. It was fine, my hubs can always use an extra loft.
WATER FUN: My love of water is a fun hobby to share with our grand-kids. One year we ended up buying two kayaks and have put them to very good use on the many reservoirs around our area. The grand-kids took to them like ducks to water!
HIKING: Living in an area surrounded by lots of raw land and many hills, it’s a very natural thing for all of us to “take to the hills” on regular hikes almost weekly. We had a wonderful hill right behind our house once, Web Hill, that was truly a fascinating place to hike and explore. Someone had put a lot of time into building an “extreme” bike trail up there. We always found plenty of treasures when we went up there.
WINTER FUN: Living in and around snow country makes winter a fun time for sledding and even ice fishing, among other easy winter activities like just building snowmen.
BIKING: St George is famous for their network of amazing bike trails. I took two of my grand-daughters once on a bike ride that wound up and around a mountain with the river down below. They, surprisingly, kept up really good. Sweet little ladies!
ARCHERY: My husband is also very fond of archery and set up a “make-shift” target once when I had my Vegas grand-kids and son come visit. The kids LOVED it and we could hardly drag them away when it was time to go. They didn’t care that the target was just an old piece of silver insulation he readily built.
4-WHEELING: We have one 4-Wheeler and a lot of our kids have their own and will bring them when they come for a visit. This is a super fun way to go explore the territories of interest.
No matter what you do, grandiose or as common as a mud-fence,
as the old saying goes: Just Do It!
They will love it!
SPECIAL BIRTHDAY PHOTO-SHOOTS
*Will just post the beautiful photos taken when we set out with no real place in mind, just to explore our city and follow our noses. We DO usually go see the two labyrinths here in town at health spa type places. The kids love those. You’ll see them on the photos. One Featured Grand-Daughter’s Birthday Photo Shoot is at two different birthdays, quite spread apart in years. We also usually stop at the restored Opera House due to it’s amazing grounds. Many photographers use this site for wedding and other photos.
Three Sisters
CAITLIN
LANIE:
The first two photos are of Lanie are quite a few years prior to the next set of pictures. Notice the same girl, years later, at the same statue in the same location.
* A fun, on-going thing to do would be to take a picture of the same child at the same place each year.
Below: 7-Years-Old 9-Years-Old and 10-Years-Old
Sisters: Caitlin and Lanie are feeding the ducks at a favorite duck pond. Photos taken years apart.
DYLAN (Little Sister, Dilly Dally)
Visiting Labyrinths
We have discovered two really interesting labyrinths right in our own community. These are usually found at Spa-Type Resorts and usually have public access. People utilizing labyrinths usually do so in a quiet, meditative way so I teach my grand-kids when we walk through them this is how we have to do it so we don’t bother anyone else that’s there. I think it’s neat because it shows them there are times for quietude contemplation. They take it serious (being quiet) and I think they feel the special quality of times like these.
Grandparenting 
You share so many great ideas. What a wonderful, bright page with such beautiful photography.
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@Good Woman: Thank you SO MUCH Good Woman! I have to shut my computer down, husband is getting ansy (he is so “jealous” of my time on the computer or the phone. I am very addicted to both…it’s ridiculous how I am!) Anyway, I went to your site as well and loved the story of the celtic angel and how you turned it into a surprise gift. I bet your daughter was really amazed!
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Thank you very much for checking out my site. My late husband would no doubt be reacting the same way concerning the time I spend on the computer, but my time is now my own, which is both good and bad.
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I can certainly see where you would have different things going on at losing a spouse. I’m sorry for your loss.
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Thank you, but it was 9 years ago so I am ok. I was just mentioning that his reaction would have been much the same so I could identify with what you were saying..
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Gotcha! Yes, it’s hard to do what I want sometimes without feeling guilty. My husband is very laid back and non-demanding, thank goodness but just out of a need to keep things in balance, I put this monkey on my own back. Ugh!
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So thorough & full of adventurous fun ideas! Thank you so much for sharing!
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What a nice comment to wake up to, Faraday! This is one of my favorite “roles” in my life now. It’s fun to have an excuse to slip into that wonderful land of childhood and play and explore with them.
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The inner child minus must always be preserved (with a dose of adult reality)!
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Agree! Too much of one without the other could be disastrous.
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