I suppose I have lots of "things" now that I'm thinking about it: writing, books, hiking, kids, etc. Everyone has a thing whether they know it or not. I kinda like my things. They make me me. They bring about smiles and a sense of clarity in an otherwise hectic life.
One of our big family things is hiking. We love to hike and have adventures outdoors (and even indoors). I'm one of those people who likes to remember every adventure, yet it's so easy to forget. The blog helps, as it's serves as an online scrap book for my children. But my husband and I wanted some kind of memorabilia from our trips and excursions.
I absolutely hate to buy my children those t-shirts with catchy sayings or "I've been to _____" because they simply grow out of them (at this point at least). I wanted a good way to remember our adventures as often as possible. Enter our rock garden:
I can't remember exactly where this started, but it began with one of the minis pocketing a rock during one of our hikes in the great outdoors (Jester Park? Indiana Sand Dunes? Another state park?). I distinctly remember telling the mini to make sure to take it out of his pocket before we left, but of course, it wound up going through my washer. I threw it in our rock garden, which at the time was made up of decorative rocks and marbles bought from a store. Those store bought rocks got dusty and I threw them away. The rock from our hike remained.
It was my husband's idea to collect a rock from each of our adventures from there on out (after looking at our one lonely rock sitting alone on a plate on a shelf in our living room). So we have. At each big hike, traveling adventure we've collected a rock. We have rocks from the Smoky Mountains, from the bottom of a waterfall in North Carolina, one from the beach along Lake Michigan, one from a mountain top looking out at the strip in Vegas, one from a quick grab in the Gallatin River in Montana, and a few more that, ironically, I can't exactly remember where their from....but ask another member of our family, and someone remembers where those rocks came from, the day it happened, followed by a "hey, remember when...."
That is exactly what I wanted.
These rocks, meaningless to someone other than the five of us, hold memories. Simple, happy, memories remembered with fondness. So apparently our family "thing" is hiking, traveling, and rock collecting.
What's your "thing?" Do you yourself have something or something you do as a family that has become your "thing?"