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WINNIE THE POOH pounces into theatres everywhere on July 15th.
ABOUT THE MOVIE
Walt Disney Animation Studios returns to the Hundred Acre Wood with “Winnie the Pooh.” Featuring the timeless charm, wit and whimsy of the original featurettes, this all-new movie reunites audiences with the philosophical “bear of very little brain” and friends Tigger, Rabbit, Piglet, Owl, Kanga, Roo—and last, but certainly not least, Eeyore, who has lost his tail. “Ever have one of those days where you just can’t win, Eeyore?” asks Pooh. Owl sends the whole gang on a wild quest to save Christopher Robin from an imaginary culprit. It turns out to be a very busy day for a bear who simply set out to find some honey. Inspired by three stories from A.A. Milne’s books in Disney’s classic, hand-drawn art style, “Winnie the Pooh” hits theatres on July 15th!
About a month (or maybe two) ago, I was invited by Darcy at Tales from the Nursery to check out Triberr. If you haven't already heard about Triberr, it is a tool created to tweet your blog posts automatically from other members of your tribe. Triberr is set so that you have one tribe you are a member of and 3 tribes in which you are the chief. Membership is via invitation only.
Once you have your invite and are connected to your tribe, you are then given 3 other tribes of which you are Chief. There are default tribe names provided but the names are easy to change to anything that sets your fancy.
The benefit of joining Triberr is that each person who is in your tribe will automatically tweet out your blogs posts to their Twitter followers. Triberr {smartly} sends the tweets out in intervals so that followers are not inundated with the same post multiple times. There are many other features of Triberr that I have yet to explore fully.
I have to be honest, I have been slow to gather my Triberr followers but I love the system and really want to work on building my tribes. I came up with 3 tribes that represent the topics that I enjoy following. If you haven't already joined a tribe, I would love for you to consider accepting an invitation from me.
My three tribes are:
- The Giveaway Girls - For those of us that host reviews and giveaways on our blogs.
- Praises4Him - For faith based bloggers wishing to connect and promote their blogs with others of a similar belief background.
- RunHappy - For us amature running mommies that get rid of our stress through running or walking.
I should say that these groups don't necessarily have to reflect every blog post that you write. I just thought it would be fun to find like minded groups to gather in my tribes.
If you would like an invitation to any of my tribes please post a comment below or send me an email.
As I was laying in a beautiful king size bed with a pair of size 7 toddler feet neatly jammed into my ribs, I started thinking about how different vacations were before I had children.
Before I had children, when I walked into the enormous bathroom and saw the beautiful jacuzzi tub, I would have pictured myself relaxing in the bubbles, enjoying some music on my Ipod while reading a book.
Now when I see a jacuzzi tub, I think, "Great, it's gonna take 10 hours to fill this sucker and I am going to end up mopping the bathroom floor. Not to mention the drowning hazard.
Before I had kids, I loved balconies that overlooked anything - beach, mountains, lakes, ponds, even a dumpster. I would take my morning tea outside, bring something to read and enjoy the fresh morning air.
Now when I arrive at a location and see a balcony, I think, "How the heck and I going to keep both my kids from launching themselves over the edge to their possible death. I have long scary conversations with them, making them fear for their lives to even step out on the door.
Before I had kids, vacations meant sleeping as long, as often or even as early as I wanted.
Now, that I have kids, I go to bed praying that the little critters (who have flat our refused to sleep in their own beds due to possible monsters, unusual sounds and shadows) will sleep until the sun has completely risen.
But truth be told, even though the "before I had kids" seems so much more relaxing and refreshing... I wouldn't change sharing vacations, making memories or seeing their faces explore new places for any of the above. Recognizing that while those little toddler feet might be uncomfortable now, they won't be there forever. So I need to cherish each memory because when I am older, and my babies are grown, I can sit on the balcony, drink my tea and reflect on once was.
Yesterday, during church, the worship team began to sing Holy Holy Holy and tears came to my eyes. It is an old hymn that I grew up singing in the Episcopal church. I love that hymn because it brings back such strong memories of my Grandmother Peaches.
For most of my life, my grandmother was the head of the Alter Guild at our church. Her and my grandfather would pick me up for the service and I would follow her back to the service room to prepare communion. She would put on her robes and prepare the communion elements. She held each challis with such great care, pouring the wine from the glass containers and placing the wafers on the silver plates. I loved watching her. After she was done, she would send me out to sit in the pews with my grandfather.
The Episcopal service is pretty standard. Not much changes weekly and the song Holy Holy Holy was sung as the communion elements made their way to the alter. I can vividly remember my grandmother bringing forth the glass and silver canisters, laying out the embroidered and neatly pressed linens. She moved gracefully around the table as the priest prepared to read from the Book of Common Prayer. The soft lights from the ceiling and the sun shining from the stain glass would make her shine like an angel.
As the worship team sung yesterday, I began to have flashes of my grandmother then unexpecdently, I began to think of my mother and her battle with cancer. And I was very sad, not for me, not for what will be my loss, I was mostly sad for my children.
I was so blessed to be with my grandmother more days than not as a child. She was always around. Every holiday, every event, every weekend. I spent weeks during the summer and school breaks trolling after her in their yard. She called me Mellie and I loved her deeply.
It has always bothered me that my children will not get to know their grandparents the same way that I did. We live to far and they only get to see them once a year. With my mom's cancer diagnosis the reality is that my children may come to a point where they barely remember her. They won't have ingrained memories like I do with Peaches. There won't be a song that is played in church that fills their mind with vivid memories that almost appear to be a movie. Their memories will be snippets, pictures in an album.
We don't know how much time we have left with my mom. Her prognosis is undetermined but I do know that my children will have a different relationship with her than I did with my grandmother. Their memories will be less vivid and it saddens me that there isn't much I can do about it.
This summer we will go home for a short 5 days. We will have that brief time to instill some more memories with their grandmother. I have started to think about things that we can do (or not do) that Lu & Eph will remember. It is hard to plant a memory. Memories are made of up personal experiences that impact the individual but if we can just come up with one, that 10 years from now, when they hear a specific song or taste a specific food and a memory will come flooding back to them - vivid, bright and almost real.
Every year my family takes a one week vacation to refresh, rejuvenate and reconnect. Typically we head straight to the beach, do not pass go, do not collect $200. This year, my husband and I decided to try something new, something a little closer to home {the closest beach is 12-14 hours from Ohio) and decided to go to the Virginia mountains.
We are timeshare owners and I did a substantial amount of research on various locations in Tennessee, North Carolina, etc. We really wanted something that didn't require an extended drive. After all my research, we settled on a resort in western Virginia called Massanutten.
Massanutten is a four season resort which offers hundreds of daily activities including golf, fishing, hiking, swimming, crafts and even basket weaving. You would be amazed at all the different activities that can fill your day.
We arrived late on Saturday night to a very smooth check in process, got our room keys and headed off to find our condominium. Our condo was a 2 bedroom with a partial kitchen and WOW it was very spacious and nice. There were two bathrooms and one included a jacuzzi tub. There was also a very large balcony that over looked a pretty tree line.
We were given an Activity Book that listed all the various activities that were provided during each day of our stay. You have the choice to buy activity cards that provide free and reduced costs on the majority of the activities. While I think the activity cards would be a benefit for many people, I wish I had spent more time looking at the activities that we wanted to participate in and comparing the costs. Fortunately, we were given 2 adult cards in exchange for attending their sales meeting, so we purchased only the 2 children's cards for $69 each. Had we purchased all 4 cards at $316, we would not have saved any money paying full price for the handful of activities that we participated in.
The resort has several beautiful pools that you can access with your resort ID card. The Woodstone pool is the one that we frequented the most as it had both an indoor and outdoor pool. The outdoor pool has an attached zero entry baby/children's pool with a giant mushroom that both my kids loved. The mountain top pool which we enjoyed but was a good drive from our condo.
Along with the regular pools their is a massive indoor/outdoor water park with slides, a wave pool, a children's area and every other type of activity you can think of. My kids loved the water park and Lu even went down one of the bigger children's slides by herself. I honestly hadn't thought about my review during the time because I didn't take any pictures at the water park.
Massanutten has been generously offered a set of activity tickets that I will be giving away at the conclusion of my posts on our vacation. It was such a beautiful place that I can't fit all the amazing activities into one posting. Hopefully one of you will win the tickets and and enjoy a fantastic vacation to Massanutten Resort.
