Camp Odayin 2023: Summer Camp (and more!) for Heart Warriors

What better way to celebrate spring – start planning summer camps! Nothing makes me happier in the cold winter months than to plan our time during the warm summer sun. With two in college, there is only one teen left at home to plan summer adventures. Top of his request list – Camp Odayin.

WHAT IS CAMP ODAYIN?

I really think my accolades from the Camp Odayin 2019 post I wrote sums up Camp Odayin the best. As a parent who has handed off their child as a newborn to a surgical heart team, the stress level was about the same when deciding if signing him up for a four night sleep-away camp (without access to technology!) would be good for them. Turns out it was one of the best decisions we made.

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Number One Birth Defect: Congenital Heart Defect

That title may sound shocking. The truth is that nearly 1 in 100 babies born each day have a congenital heart defect (CHD). Some go unnoticed. Others become apparently within a few days or month of birth. Then there are those that (thankfully) are noticed before birth and require surgery within days of arriving in the world. This week, February 7th – 14th, we are going to highlight on our social media pages areas of all things CHD, but today want to share with your a bit of our heart journey.

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Social Distancing Party

These are crazy times. Normal life vs. Pandemic. How do we celebrate our milestones and still protect each other, our loved ones, and those at the highest risk of complications from COVID-19? Wanting to celebrate the end of high school and the departure for college, we had to get creative and host a social distancing graduation party. Since the next few months include holidays, and birthdays, we thought we would share our tips on what we learned and what we plan to do for the holidays.

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Covid-19 Return to Classroom Plans for our College, High School, and Junior High kids

The posts on Facebook say it all. Team “they must go back” and Team “keep them online” keep flooding my feed. School districts are slowly rolling out their plans to return to the classroom with Covid-19, but also giving parents only days to decide between options for the upcoming school year. Seems almost more stressful than Spring Break of 2020, and now with the 2020-2021 school year on the horizon, there are choices to be made. With three boys entering three different schools, we had three choices to make.

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Filling a Freezer: Family Farm Beef Purchase

I have spent decades supporting Farm Aid. I shop farmers’ markets in the summers and, for the most part, keep little processed food in the freezers. However, even with feeding three hungry boys, I had yet to purchase a bulk meat order from a family farm. Over the course of this pandemic of worrying about food shortages and seeing empty shelves at Costco, the time felt right to make the commitment.

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Pandemic Photo Shoot

These last few months have been weird. There’s school but it’s all online. We work (both essential workers) but once home we’ve nowhere to go. No after school activities. No concerts. No Booster meetings. No shopping. NO HAIRCUTS. Our governor gave the green light for social distancing photo shoots to take place and we (ok, I) jumped at the chance to document this weird time. You should, too. Here’s why…

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Class of 2020: Senior Year Quarantined

I had *really* high hopes for 2020. January did not start out how I had hoped and really planned for February to pick up the slack. Then March happened. Don’t even get me started on April. Finally, the gut-punch came this past week when the governor announced that students would not return to the classroom this year. This meant my oldest, Class of 2020, would not be returning to his high school as a student.

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Shutterfly Photo Storage for Mobile Uploads

I have over 649 photos on my iPhone (I know, not an earthshattering number, but it’s a lot for me!).  I am always afraid I am going to lose my favorite photos. I also hate just “dumping” the photos on to a “cloud”. While I take a lot of photos, but I don’t need to save ALL of them.  With over 40k photos on my laptop and more on the phone, how do I save the ones I want?  

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Instant Pot Egg Bites

I have the worst sweet tooth in the morning. My go-to breakfast is usually something sugar-based such as a donut, coffee cake, muffin, waffles, french toast…..yum! There are also times that savory is the way I want to start my day and my weakness is egg-bites. At almost five bucks a pop for this on-the-go breakfast, I don’t indulge very often. Then I realized I could make these at home…

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