| Castle Week, August 2009 |
| In the summer of 2008, Evan and Levi had fun with themed-weeks coordinated by me, Dad/Dave. As the summer was coming to a close in 2009, Mom/Becky asked Evan what he’d liked during the summer and what he still wanted to do. Evan was sad that we hadn’t done any themes during the summer of 2009. I was immediately guilted into getting in gear and putting something together for the last two weeks of summer. At Evan’s suggestion, the first week was a castle week. |
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When Monday morning rolled around, I had two shields made up for the kids, one with the Whitaker crest for my side of the family, and one with the Gunn crest for Becky’s side. I also bought two of those long foam things for the pool to use as lances (jousting poles). Of course, since that’s what I’d put my effort into, they were originally more excited by the knight-themed figures I’d bought that cost me no effort and only a couple bucks. |  |
| Not to worry, though. When the figures had lost a bit of the excitement, we were off to the park to test our jousting skills via some rings I rigged up to hang from the trees. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| For day 2, we headed out on a tour of castles in the Kansas City area. No, I’m not kidding. With a bit of research, mostly thanks to a Castles of the United States website, we tracked down five castles. |
| We didn’t go in any of the castles since none were set up for visitors and a couple were even private residences, but we got to walk around the one at right. It was our favorite. Sadly, it has been abandoned and is very run down, having basically been turned into a dumping ground. Oh, and anyone who knows Evan at all won’t be surprised to see that he was pretty much in some kind of costume each day for the theme week. |
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This “castle” is the most likely to be recognized by Kansas Citians. It is part of the UMKC campus. I’m not sure how it fits the definition of “castle.” Apparently a castle just has to be made with stone and have some kind of tower. Forget rules like being European, hundreds of years old, and being used to house kings and queens and other nobles. |
| The last three castles consisted of two privately owned residences (the two on the left) and one that is rented out for parties (on the far right). |
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| Day 3 was spent indoors, mostly in Evan and Levi’s very own brand new castle. For $15.00 at Hobby Lobby, you can’t beat the cost of entertaining your kids for a whole day or more, but the thing was as tough to put together as an unassembled piece of furniture. |  |
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On the 4th day, we went to a castle-themed park. Evan decked himself out as Robin Hood since we’d watched the Disney movie of the same name that morning. |  |
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Day 5 strayed from the theme. Originally, we’d planned to go to the Peace Pavilion, which supposedly had an underwater castle. After our half hour trek out there, it turned out to be closed. We switched gears and went down the street to the puppet institute. |
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Other than the knight marionette the kids posed with above, there was nothing about the activity that was castle-themed, but it turned out to be quite the successful impromptu field trip. Evan and Levi loved making their own puppets and putting on a puppet show. |
| Well, our castle week was quite the success. Thanks to friends on Facebook for some of your suggestions. Bye, now. We’re headed back home to our own castle. |  |
Head to EvanWhitaker.com or LeviWhitaker.com for more of our individual pages. |
