Welcome to the grand opening of the all-new Schoening family blog. Not that
anyone really knew about our previous endeavor
(schoeningfamily.blogspot.com).
Here are a couple of reasons this blogging journey is going to be different:
1. The girls are old enough to help us update the blog. And, we want
them to be comfortable with posting their thinking online, and
knowledgeable about what to post and what not to post.
2. Erin and I are also going to share managing the blog. We are both
trying to blog more professionally as well, and this will be another
outlet for us.
Each member of our family will have a page on the blog and we will
update on a regular basis. We will be sharing all kinds of pictures and
videos as well.
Our first set of posts will highlight the fun things we did on our
vacation to South Dakota during the first week of July. We hope you
enjoy hearing about the things happening in our lives, and we hope you
will post comments and questions.
Let me start my inaugural blog post with a disclaimer...I am not the writer in the family. Devin (a former journalist and journalism teacher) has always been a gifted writer. I think the girls take after their daddy because, as they were writing their first blog posts, Gracie was talking about how writers use humor and Claire was making sure to include "juicy words" in her writing. I'll try to take some tips from my family of writers, but I'll be honest...I'm a little intimidated having my writing appear next to theirs!
As I'm sure you've read, our family has just returned from our vacation to South Dakota. One of my favorite things about vacations is that they open the door to so many new experiences. The world is a classroom, filled with endless things we can learn from and passions waiting to be discovered. Before this trip; burro, buffalo, prairie dog and cave were all just words-pictures in a book or an image on TV to my children. Now they are something they have experienced first hand.
Not only have they now seen a prairie dog, but they know what it eats and the sound it makes. They've observed buffalo interacting with one another. They've seen the total blackness that can only be found deep within a cave. They are able to compare the begging burros of Custer State Park to our own begging pets at home.
After visiting Mt. Rushmore and listening to Pink's "Dear Mr. President" on the radio, Gracie began asking lots of great questions about the presidents and political parties. She decided that she wants to learn more about George Washington and George W. Bush. She is anxious to get back to school to see if her teacher has some books that might help her out. Her inquiry started outside of the classroom walls, but her passion for the topic will bring it back to school.
The vacation is over, but we've got 6 more weeks of summer left...let the learning continue!
Prairie dogs make a high pitched squeak if you get too close!
Although the Badlands look hard as a rock, they are actually made of soft dirt, rock and clay and erode at the rate of an inch a year. They will be completely gone in 500,000 years!
We learned that these burros aren't a bit afraid of people and have learned to rely on them as a food source
I love everything about vacations. I love the planning, the anticipation, the packing, traveling to the destination, the new experiences, all of it. There is only one part of vacation I could do without - getting home.
This summer our family vacation took us to South Dakota. More specifically our destination included the Badlands, the Black Hills and Whispering Winds Cottages (more on them in a later post). As was the case last year when we trekked all the way to California, we decided to make the trip via automobile. And as I watch Chevy Chase in Vacation as I write this, we even made the trip in a new vehicle - the Volkswagen Jetta Sportswagen-ster.
We've decided we love to travel by car. We Wikipedia (that's a verb, right?) every town (no matter how large or small) to learn interesting tidbits along the way (more on that in another post). We have all kinds of things for the kids to do in the car - traveling bingo, books, iPod touches, iPads, DVD's, Nintendo DSs and more. We like to make the traveling time a major part of the vacation.
But it's the dreaded trip home that always looms large. So this year we decided to plan something fun for at least a portion of the long ride home.
I posed a challenge to my daughters to decide the appropriate song for us to cover. Claire, who is 6-years-old, proposed we should attempt Katy Perry's Firework because we would be doing it around the 4th of July.
We agreed, and this is the final product.
While it isn't the best lip dub on the web, it was a lot of fun and allowed us to extend our vacation to the long Interstate 90/29 ride home. We hope you enjoy the video and please feel free to share and leave us a comment and a link to your own family lip dub.
We saw the begging burros, which are very begging. They look like
part donkey part horse! When you put your hand out with the food in the
palm they will put their whole giant mouth around your hand, literally.
They like, no love carrots and powdered donuts!
My
sister can put her whole fist in her mouth so I guess she wanted to see
if one of the burros could, so she stuck her fist in a black
burro…unfortunately it could not only do that but it could also bite
with its yellow and black teeth.
After the begging burros finished their bag of donuts one of them stuck his/her head in the bag twice!
When we leave it is difficult to roll the windows up because their huge heads are in the way.
I
found these funny, cool and playful animals at Custer State Park in
South Dakota.
Thank you for reading about these awesome animals!
