I'm back

I've been out of the blogsphere for a few days - did ya miss me?

What's on my mind today?

I'm bummed that Myrtle Beach property values have gone up so dramatically. It's good on one hand, as the stuff we already own is worth lots more. On the other hand, it's making it darn near impossible to justify additional purchases there for 2005.

I have 3 messages into a realtor couple in Gatlinburg, I'm waiting for them to get back from vacation to respond - may be our next place to expand. Their voicemail says that they're responding to email while away, but it doesn't seem that they are.

Local real estate is moving slower than I'd hoped. Auburn should be sold by now - Erie too. I hope Claremont goes quickly. Need to get Kennet rented quickly TO A GOOD TENANT!

Things are cool on the family front. Logan seems to be developing a relationship with the Lord - very cool!

We all had a very fun time last night talking about vacationing and other fun family activities. The conversation started around Disney World. I almost scheduled the trip, but then thought about how much more we could do by applyin that money elsewhere. So I turned it into a fun family activity. I rounded off the cost of a Disney trip to $2000 (very conservative for sure). Anyhow, each of the four of us was given $500 in play money. I told them that we could all turn in all of our money in exchange for a very fun filled 7 days at Disney OR we could brainstorm other ways to spend the money. These are some of the things we came up with...

Season Passes to Geauga Lake - as many visits as we want all summer
camping
cavern and Indian reservation tour
visit the Great Lakes Science Center
trip to Williamsburg (Logan is really into it)
trip to Hershey PA (Taylor likes, Logan not so sure)
Drive in movie
canoing
horseback riding
semi-pro baseball game
zoo
pontoon rental at portage lakes
biking the towpath
hiking
bowling
skating
dover lake park
circus
HOF parade
picnic
putt-putt golf
parks
garage saling
planetarium
host campfire story night

After "budgeting" money to all of these activities, we found that we still had almost $500 left over to consider an additional long weekend getaway. We considered a couple 3-4 day weekends to Myrtle Beach, A trip to the mountains, Niagra falls (Steph too worried about Taylor), or a coupe trips to an indoor water park during the cold months.

At any rate, the excercise really gave the kids an appreciation for money and stretching it out. Logan, who was very interested in going to Disney won't even hear about it now. She thinks we'd be fools to do that. She says it would be a much better choice to do all of these other fun (and some free) things instead.

In addition to learning about the value of money, we're teaching the kids about good behavior and helping out by offerring "tickets" for those things (we also take tickets away for bad behavior). The idea is that when they earn enough tickets they can turn them in to do something fun (I didn't want to make it a direct financial link). I think what I might do is tie these two things together by saying that mom and dad will provide the money for all the fun activities that we discussed, and that they will have to provide the good behavior to earn each activity with their tickets.

Anyhow, I'm probably a dork but we're having fun with it and it's working so what the heck.