Memorial Day 2013

I am all about simplicity these days, so I was very pleased with how we celebrated Memorial Day this year. After finishing school time, the children and I spent 20 minutes packing up a brown bag lunch of PBJs. I obtained the address of what was probably the nearest cemetery to our home, grabbed our book of prayers for the dead, and our whole family jumped in the car.

All the grave sites of servicemen and women were festooned with fluttering flags. We spent a good amount of time simply walking around, the children exclaiming about details on the stones, our reading to them the names and in which wars they fought.

A large war memorial at the cemetery

We were tickled to arrive and discover that the cemetery was hosting a Memorial Day event. Patriotic music was playing and under a canopy were tables set with all manner of American picnic fare with which we supplemented our brown bag lunches: lemonade, watermelon, chicken nuggets, biscuits, chips, and cookies.

I brought a picnic blanket but was pleased to find a picnic bench under the shade of a tree.

Our idyllic outing ended with some drama when Margaret walked straight into a red ant pile and got about ten bites before Daddy was able to brush all the ants off of her (and it was so fortunate that he was right there with her, or she'd have received many more bites before we could run over to where she was).

While I cooked dinner, I had the children color free printables of the American flag
--simplicity is the name of the game in arts and crafts for me these days!

Dessert was my own "easy sneezy" invention when I noticed that Klondike bars were on sale this week for less than $2 per 6: Klondike bar covered in whipped cream with strawberries and blueberries to make little American flags!