Category: Family

15 Year Wedding Anniversary Trip: Deep Creek Lake

Travis and I celebrated our 15 year wedding anniversary last week (10/19), which coincided with Jack’s school being closed on Friday… so we went to a fabulous cabin in Deep Creek for a long weekend! Over the years, we’ve gone on some amazing anniversary trips, pretty much always taking Jack with us. This year, we decided to keep it relatively close by with a trip to Deep Creek and save our “big” trip for another spring break blowout.

Deep Creek Lake is located a little less than 3 hours from our house, so we decided to pack up after work/school on Thursday and make the trip that night. That way, we could be all settled when we woke up on Friday and have all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning for fun before heading home.

We typically have our dog sitter watch Ollie, but we decided to bring him with us since the cabin was dog friendly for no extra fee. He enjoys car rides with us and sleeping in bed with us even more, so it made sense for him to tag along.

Here are some highlights from our trip:

All the cabin snuggly time – we logged into our Netflix account to watch tv, brought video games and books and enjoyed some down time. It was a rainy chilly weekend, so it was perfect to turn on the fireplace and get all comfy in some snuggle blankets. Ollie enjoyed it too.

Checking out Sacred Ground Gem Mining – We purchased an “Emerald bag” for about $20 and Jack took it over to the sluice to dump a small portion at a time into the screen tray, submerge it and watch his gemstones appear. Afterwards, he went through the accompanying photo identifier to figure out all of the different gemstones he found in his bag. This was a HUGE hit for him!

Deep Creek Donuts – Who doesn’t love homemade donuts?! Super yummy flavors and a delicious afternoon treat!

The hot tub – We loved the cabin’s hot tub and got lots of use out of it even though it was really chilly outside. The view from the backyard was beautiful with all the leaves changing and luckily, we didn’t see any bears while we were hanging out in our ‘people stew.’

If you want a little trek through our first 10 years of marriage, I was reminded of this post I did back in 2018 that makes me smile: Celebrating 10 years of Marriage.

Jack’s First Day of 6th Grade

Today is our first day of school and we officially have a middle schooler in the house!

Jack is excited to go to a new school with TWO floors and meet a bunch of new friends this year. He’s also thrilled that his best friend shares his homeroom and a few other classes too. Most of all, he is eager to learn more about what clubs he will be able to join once they launch this fall, with the robotics club high up on his list.

With Jack getting older, I asked him whether he still wanted me to write about him on Pocketful of Joules. He’s been approving his own photos for a while, so I wanted to make sure that he had the chance to veto any Jack-specific posts if it makes him uncomfortable. I suggested maybe we discontinue the ‘back to school’ type posts and only include him when talking about family trips and general adventures. However, he said he would like to keep up with the Jack posts for now.

So, for the time being you’ll still see my kiddo on the blog from time to time. But, over the next few years I may start sharing a little less.

Today though, I’m happy to share this adorable, smart, hilarious and very, very cute 6th grader!

Use Your Library!

I feel like I’ve said this a hundred times, but it came up again recently and I just wanted to spend a couple minutes talking about how awesome it is to use your library!

Jack and I were at Costco, and OF COURSE we wandered into the books section. And I started grabbing books, reading the backs and liking them. And Jack started grabbing books and throwing them in our cart. Which I then throw them back out of our cart. Because even at Costco prices… books are expensive!

Instead, {PRO TIP} I started taking quick photos of each of the books we liked:

(Jack did end up getting one book while we were there, because we have a hardback collection of all the Last Kids on Earth books and a new one came out.)

Okay, so those quick photos? Yeah, when I got home I logged into our local county library, did a search for each title, and then added myself to the “hold” list for each one. Sure, some lists were long… but others only had one or two people in front of me.

In fact, within less than a week, three of the books from our Costco trip were waiting for me at the library to pick up.

If we end up borrowing all 5 of the books we looked at, that will save us a total of $61.95. Which is more than 6 Costco watermelon. Or a heck of a lot of snowballs this summer!*

There are even more options for those of us who have e-readers. In addition to searching the library for books you’ve seen, you can also search digital catalogues like OverDrive (different link by state but here is the one for Maryland OverDrive, and Hoopla for free books to borrow.

Anyways. Save some money and use the library this summer!

* For those unfamiliar, in Maryland we have these crushed ice snow cones called snowballs that are delicious on a hot summer day.