We Are The Wanderers!

Welcome to the Sottile 5 corner of the web! Today, I wanted to introduce ourselves on the blog, butI got a bit distrated when we had a runaway rabbit. We are still not sure on how she got loose or if she was taken, but for now we have been searching high and low and are only resting to sleep. Unfortunately, we are staying in the middle of the woods and it is frequented by a lot of wildlife, which does not bode well for a tiny bunny. Hopefully she will just hunker down until we can find her. She has been a house bunny since birth and this is not really an ideal situation.

The head of our family is also the 'fun' parent. Husband @ReadinTruckinAndSnackin on Instagram and I have been together 21 years and cannot believe that we have a graduating senior. Life goes by so fast, that we are so happy that we took the time, money and leap to travel and see the world with these kids. He is a linehaul truck driver with an awesome company that has him home every night and weekends off, what more could we ask for? His hobies are RC cars, Audio Books, Model trains and traveling. His favorite travel memory is taking our car tot he max on the Autobahn in Germany, he can't wait to get back there and try it again! Dad loves to game with the boys and shop with us girls. I would easily say that he is the laid back easy going guy to my high strung, always worried self!

Here I am, it's Michelle of @SheBreathesBooks and also the head of @OurWanderingAdventures social media pages. I am a book obsessed, restless wanderer that must always be planning a trip and on the move. I studied travel and tourism in college and that could explain my obsession with seeing all th enooks and crannies of our beautiful world. I'm a worldschooling mom of 3 that does all the planning for our trips and all the bookings as well. I can always be found at the pool with a book, snuggled on our couch with a book or sitting under the awning with a book....sometimes I even take the golf cart to the waterfront...with a book! LOL. I don't have a favorite destination yet but am eager to get back to Scotland love cruising and can't wait for our trip west.

@BakerStreetPrefect is our resident brain, who makes us so proud every single day! She is absolutely amazing to watch work and has incredible willpower. She has finished high school at 16 and volunteers every place we travel too. She is obsessd with collecting Junior Ranger badges at all the National Parks and Memorials. She is also my buddy reader, her and I love chatting about books and drinking tea...no matter what the temperature is. Her favorite travel memory is having her Quinceanera in Mexico tied with visiting the Harry Potter Studios Tour in London!

@KrazyCricutKid is our go-to Tech Guru that takescare of all things electronic for us and even manages to run several businesses on the road! He is a Cricut Craft Teacher, 3D Printing shop owner and even runs an off jobs business at all the campgrounds we go to, As if all of that were not enough, he is also a paid Fortnite Streamer and gets to say that he gets paid to play videogames!LOL. I absolutely love the hustle that this kid rises to every single day. He's all about the grind and we couldn't be prouder. This kid is all about dedication to what he does and loves traveling the world in search of the next great thing in tech. His favorite travel memory is seeing the London Tower Bridge for the first time.

 

@RomanNoodles.007 is our in house artist! Hel oves drawing and gaming and that's about it. He's always up for tring something new but he is definitely the homebody of the family and even when we are on the road, he much prefers to stay at the camper or at least get back right away. You can usually find him sketching along the water or playing videogames on rainy days inside. He is a huge graphic novel fan and even loves creating his own. His favorite travel memory is staying club level at the Grand Floridian and having a kid think he was Miguel from the movie Coco! He posed for photos with this family and even made the kids laugh when he insisted it wasn't really him, because they did not believe him!

Thanks for getting to know us and we welcome you back tomorrow to get to know our rig and site we are at for the moment!

Enjoy Every Minute!
~The Sottile 5

Not All Who Wander Are Lost...

Hello out there!!! It has been quite a bit since I have been in the habit of blogging and I need to get back into it, so here I am!

Our family continues to take more and more new paths as the kids get older and time sails by! We are primarily on Instagram but sometimes my captions get a bit ridiculous and I figured it was time for a new place for long thoughts and how tos and what not. 

Come along and join us as we travel the USA in our 40ft completely renovated Forest River Salem. On this blog you will get photos of our campsites, activities, renovation, future plans and what we are eating on the road. We spend aroud 8 months of the year traveling the country and then 4 months at home preparing for the next trip. Our goal is to continue to show the kids how big this world of ours is and that they don't ever need to feel anchored to one place.

Where in the world are we now? We have been in Northern IL at the Sugar Shores RV Resort in Durand, IL. This place is right on the Sugar River, which makes for plenty of fun adventures and around 2 hours from downtown Chicago. It's the perfect place to be in the middle of nowhere and relax and still enjoy a day trip in the city. 

Ou family is having an absolute blast, but be forewarned that we sometimes spend a month at a place and sometimes a night or 2. We tend to really let the wind blow us wherever we feel like exploring next or sometimes we just don't find the right fit at a campground. Full reviews of the places we stay at are usually on Facebook review sites, google reviews and our Instagram page also known as @OurWnderingAdvetures. Welcome to another corner of the internet that belongs to us and on our next post, I will introduce us as a family and then on Wednesday, I will introduce you to our camper! 

Welcome Aboard and Wander With Us!

Hello, Is Anyone Out There?

Hello out there in this little corner of the web! I can't believe how long has gone since I was last here blogging about everything, I don't even know if I remember how to do this.

We are still happily home schooling and my oldest is a Sophomore!? Where does the time go, seriously! We are still using Seton as our curriculum but are now incredibly active in the 4-H, Volunteering in our community and seeing the world! Our next venture is to hit the road in our travel trailer and see the country from a different perspective, all while continuing to home school of course!

For the time being the trailer will only be for seasonal living 4-5 months out of the year. It will definitely be a new adventure, but the long term goal is of course to go full time at some point.

I am hoping to turn this in to a 4-H blog of some sort, showcasing our adventures as husband and wife volunteer leaders, what out children go through as members and as officers. It's a snippet of our life that is quite important to us, so I am thinking that is where this blog is headed. This blog has been through many lives as it has held and seen what has been important to me at different times in my life and even though each story should be a different blog, I like keeping it all in one place. I am still figuring it all out, so we will see if it will be a weekly blog, monthly or maybe later it can be a daily again! Let me get in to the groove of our school year starting this year and then we will see!

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Menu Plan Monday...Err Tuesday!

The happiest countdown moment in the life of a Disney traveler has happened today! Our Magicbands arrived, signaling that it's time to get packing and loaded and go! It was a great high to the low of the fact that a long weekend of fun was over. I hope you all had a great holiday weekend. We spent it out of town but having a lot of fun together as a family.

Did anyone else wake up today thinking it was Monday? We got our trash out, did school work and even began to get ready for Cross Country when my husband sent me a text to inform me that I was completely off on days and there was no cross country until tomorrow! Oh dear, at least we are prepared for tomorrow. Since we did a lot of eating out I knew I had to get our menu in order for this week and here I am finally sharing another Menu Plan Monday on a Tuesday since it's not really Monday!

Tuesday: Mexican street corn with Quesadilla bar (Watermelon with lime and salt for dessert)
Wednesday: Grilled Chicken sandwich w/ individual Caprese salad (Ice cream Sundaes for dessert)
Thursday: Mexican Grilled Hotdogs (Hot dog topped with avocado, pico de gallo and jalapenos)
Friday: Salad bar with Baked Potato bar and Summer berries for dessert
Saturday: Mini Meatloaves with Mashed Potato toppings and cantaloupe slices for dessert
Sunday: Fettuccini Alfredo but the noodles are made from Zucchini

All dinners are being served with a pitcher of ice water and lemon slices to cut down on our carb overload! LOL! I needed a quick week of meals that could be prepared fast or in the crockpot! With Fall sports kicking off, I knew it would be a week of rush, rush, rush followed by evenings of wine, wine wine! HAHA!

 

Enjoy every minute my friends!

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Vacation Prep



Do you ever sit and think about when you planned a vacation, how it all seemed so far away and then when you are actually there it seems to have flown by? Perspective seems to be everything not only with vacations but with life too. We started school this week but of course have been overwhelmed with the thought of our vacation that there it is really easy to distract everyone! We keep getting shipments in the mail whether it be from Disney World, Disney Cruise Lines, The Disney Store or other random purchases we have made to prep that it's easy to get off track!

How far in advance do you begin packing? Our Disney Store order arrived (part 1 of 2) and I really wanted to begin right away but I knew that suitcases would just get in the way of our daily lives. We packed about a month early for our winter in Mexico and well let's just say it got aggravating to see things laying around all the time! I felt that it was necessary so that we would have all that we need but of course we ended up with WAY TOO MUCH!! I am hoping to avoid that this time around as we are driving AND we are now driving a rental that is MUCH smaller than our regular car...why? Oh because the engine blew on our vehicle and it will take them about 30 days to put in a new one...YUP, when it's vacation time for our family something drastic always happens. It also happens to be the week that our property taxes are due and that happens to be ON our anniversary! Can we have an anniversary dinner at McDonald's please? Oh well, we are thankful no one was hurt and that the Lord has provided us with all that we need, it could be worse!

One way we love to countdown our vacation is with a simple paper chain. The entire family gets involved in making the paper chain and then the top of our countdown becomes a window or door decoration on the trip too! With each day we take off a paper strip and pull one question from our Disney Trivia game and ask it out loud. This helps us prepare for the DCL trivia game onboard and also to have fun every day when pulling off the link for the day.

I have been hitting up Disney Outlets and used video places (they sometimes sell Disney pins) to fill up their lanyards with pins to trade! I love spending next to nothing on pins and they get ones they really want and have fun doing it! It's an activity that can be enjoyed in the parks and on the ship. The kids also have their own itineraries and money put on a gift card for them.

I've also kept busy making door and window décor for our resort and cruise stays. Getting the kids involved in one activity a week, 1 Disney Family Movie a week, 1 package arrival a week takes car of almost half the week and easily helps it fly by. We also like to spend 1 day of the weekend chatting about things we like to do where we want to go first and sometimes opinions change and others they stay the same. Needless to say the planning all goes by in a whirlwind.

 We also like to buy books that pertain to our vacation destination once every other month or so to help with planning but mainly to look at all there is to do! We are Members of B&N and that gives us 20% off coupons that come in the mail every other month or so and then add it to the 10% members discount we get daily and it's well worth it! We always know when a coupon comes in it's time to buy a vacation book!

My daughter and I are having a blast making bows for our MagicBands that can easily be made into hair bows on the days we do not have them on the bands. We are also cute bag obsessed! This is a lunch cooler that we have decided to carry around as a purse! LOL

Even when we are not planning for Disney, it's always on my mind! Here I am at my book club and ready to talk Disney with anyone that eyes my purse! The Disney Dooneys are my biggest weakness!

The planning binder is a MUST for our Disney trips. We change out the cover sheet for each vacation and each page inside can easily be accessed for additional information. We use highlighters and different colored pens and inside is a folder that holds any documents we get from Disney. I will be doing a Disney Binder post in the future where I will just go through this binder. One thing we love about our cover sheet is that it has the vacation year on the bottom and destination at the top but the center is plain and this is done with a purpose. When it's time to go, we ditch the binder and put all the sheets inside the pockets of our passporter on the coordinating days and then we pull out the cover sheet, laminate it and use a magnetic clip to turn it into our dry-erase board on our resort room doors or cruise line door! It's so much fun to read all the messages from people.

Just a hint of our planning madness, but it sure is fun! With our Transatlantic cruise next year, I hope to document our entire planning process with a once a week post, but we will see as I have already booked the trip and we have been getting things in the mail for some time now. Having 2 trips booked at one time is crazy! Enjoy every minute my friends, time certainly flies when you are having fun!



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And Then I Woke Up...

Hello everyone! My goodness, as I blow the dust off this blog I am left thinking about so much that has been going on over here. Bloggers out there in the world, do you ever have that feeling where even though you are busy every minute of every day (or at least it seems that way), they you are just not creating anything blog worthy? Yes, vacations and getaways are spectacular but at the same time...well I want to LIVE them and not be a slave to my camera. Have you reached the point where the school work that used to be cute and creative is just WORK now? I have taken photos of the kids at the board doing Algebra and yet what can I say about it? There are no cute games for Algebra! I had decided to step away for a bit and re-evaluate where this blog should go...and then I woke up.

There will always be things to blog about, meals to prepare and fun games to play and learn from. As the kids get older the posts may be fewer and farther between but there will always be blog worthy parts of our life, why? Because I love my life and every miniscule part of it. What may not be interesting to others, may in fact be a time capsule for my children to look back at when they are older. A digital scrapbook is what I have created and though I may not have been blogging for anyone in particular in the past, now I blog for them. These past few months have had us preparing for our County Fair with 4-H and all of their projects and judging and then they found out they made it to the State Fair and it was a whirlwind trip downstate. Here is my daughter at the fashion show for sewing. She made that skirt, those cuffs and that scarf. It's amazing what kids can do when you let their imaginations go wild. Me? I can't sew a button on straight and look at her, taking on the world. She went on to win the Champion prize in this competition!

As we continue down the path of growth, I will share the fun of being a parent to teenagers, the vacations we take and how to prepare for them (we are headed to the beach, Disney and a cruise VERY SOON!). I will still share my menu plans, the activities and sports in the world of homeschooling, along with just every day bits and pieces of my life. I may only blog once a month or every day for a week...it will happen and life will get in the way but I will try and keep a record of it as much as I can. I needed that wake up call, the realization that I blog for me, for them. It's easy to take photos and have them stack up in my phone but to be able to put some out there as a memory that will be here long after I am gone. It's something they can share with their own children.

The fair season took us down several new paths. At the beginning of Spring we brought home a new pet or shall I say our first ever pet. My youngest decided to begin raising a show rabbit and Carrots entered our life. It has been great fun and also been quite the lesson in responsibility. I am proud to say I have not once walked the rabbit (crazy right?!) nor have I ever cleaned his litter (he is a house broken rabbit). He is a Crème D' Argent bunny and is just about reaching his maximum size. It has definitely thrown a kink in many plans as we have brought a rabbit with us on vacation and camping and even on long road trips! Carrots has needed a sitter when we were gone too long and sometimes he even comes with to grandma and grandpas house!

While Carrots was being shown at the fair, my middle son fell in love with a new litter of Polish rabbits (not too new, they were 2 months old) and well of course one went home with us. Cocoa is the newest addition to our family and this will only get a wee bit bigger. It has been a lot of fun watching my boys grow up as they become responsible pet owners. This responsibility will follow them through life and it was something they needed to learn. We will soon begin showing them the cost of having a pet and discuss money and other things, I will post more about this in the future!

Out of nowhere, my shy and quiet middle son decided he wanted to do a food demonstration and enter that competition category this year. I was so PROUD to see him step out of his shell and take on this new challenge that I didn't care how he did, just that he was doing it! He ended up taking Champion on this too! It was an amazing moment to see his eyes register the win and me? Well I was the nerd mom crying in the second row. It wasn't because he won, it was because he was willing to tackle something new and though he was nervous he did it! If you care to see it, here is him practicing at home, I am laughing a lot and I don't even know if we finished the entire video but we were just being silly at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzwCit0-xb0

At the end of fair season, the kids entered 36 projects and ended up with 34 blue ribbons winners (my youngest has green as he is in a different age group) and 2 red ribbon second place winners. They worked so hard this year that they learned their hard work can take them anywhere they want to be. I was there to answer questions and of course help them find things but the rest was up to them and they did a phenomenal job with it all.

This Spring and Summer our National Parks passport has seen a lot of action as we took off in search of history, our swimsuits have been in lakes, oceans, rivers, streams, waterparks and hotel pools this Spring and Summer as we have ventured off many beaten trails to encounter new adventures. Our vehicle has had many miles of dirt roads, gravel trails and highways as we picked up and saw our surroundings but mostly our family has experienced so much time together that we have grown to learn more about one another. Small hotel rooms, tiny tents, cramped backseats, loaded train cars and over flowing buses...we have traveled them all in the desire to see more and learn more and we also came out loving more. The world can be anything we want it to be and as a family we are all seeing it through the same eyes and yet different ones too. Life is all about living and we are doing plenty of it.

As a new school year begins, we may spend some time in the classroom but we will make sure that we spend more time out of it. Learning is happening all around and life is sailing by, we don't want to miss a minute. We only have these few years with our children and if you take the time to realize that at 11 years old our oldest will only be living under our roof a handful of years more, it's why we do what we do. The bulk of her life under our guiding hand has come and gone so quickly that we need to hang on to these slivers we have left. The middle son is only one year behind her and the youngest 2 years behind him. The time goes too fast, though I want to take it all back and do more, I am eager to send them out into this world and see what they can do with all that they have been given and developed on their own.

Enjoy every minute my friends, the time goes and before we know it we only have memories...

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Menu Plan Monday

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, we certainly did and we managed to stay in town all weekend long, kind of! We had a lot on our schedule as it was the first weekend that didn't bring frosty temps to the Midwest. It was time to scrub down patio furniture after pulling it out of storage, put new sand in the patio cracks and fix any blocks that may look worse for wear. It was a nitty gritty kind of weekend and we were ready for it! The kids knew that they had to work hard if we were to be rewarded and the reward was a dessert party at the Drive-In movie theater to see The Jungle Book and Zootopia! We had already seen the latter but it was still such a good movie that we were ready to see it again! It was all phenomenal and we had a lot of fun! What did you do this weekend?

Now it's time for Menu Plan Monday! I found this spectacular Monday-Weekend pad of paper in the Dollar Spot at Target and figured it was much nicer than having to print something out or the more expensive pads out there! I LOVE IT! It fits right into my planner for grocery day too!

 

Monday: Spinach & Feta stuffed Chicken breasts with Green Beans and a garden salad. Served with Iced Black Tea.

 

Tuesday: Lettuce Wraps & Raw Veggie Platter with homemade hummus (portable for a cross country event and late night) served with Lemon Water infused overnight in waterbottles and strained in the morning.

 

Wednesday: Veggie Lasagna with a Caprese Salad & Iced Green Tea.

 

Thursday: Grilled Salmon and Squash served with a garden salad and Lemon Water

Friday: Couscous Chicken Soup with Homemade Dutch Oven bread

Saturday: Grilling and Bonfire Party

Sunday: Kids have a cross country race and then we will go out to dinner with family to celebrate afterwards.

Enjoy every minute my friends!

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Wednesdays are for Organizing!

Oh happy is the day when the office supplies comes out. I love to get the highlighters in a row, the pens in a rainbow of colors and the pencils sharpened just so. I enjoy getting file folders and labels, fun index cards and stickers, paperclips and pins, bands and tabs. Office supplies put me into an organizing coma and it was time for one, in fact is was long past time for a day like this. It was time to get organized for our county fair projects for 4H. We already have a lot of our books gone through, marked up and ready to create our exhibits but this was our day to get due dates, judging dates, supply lists and such all set.

The only place to hold a meeting like this is Starbucks. This is the perfect place for the kids to work and not be distracted AND get good treats while we are there too! I have 3 kids and each of the big kids is taking 11 projects and my youngest is taking 6. This makes for a lot of project books, glue sticks and poster boards! This day was spent labeling a file folder for each project, putting in any notes and sketches as well as project books. On the front of each folder we have half for due dates and the other half is for the list of items they will need for their display. On the back of the folder is a list of what is required for that project. 

As we were working and chatting, I starting reflecting on our second year of 4H and how excited we were starting out and how we still remain excited to this day. We have had so much fun getting involved in such an awesome club and even better we have learned so much. My husband has just signed on to coach a robotics team for the 4H this year and he is very excited for what this brings to him. He is a man that works 70+ hours a week and now he is adding this on too? That's just how much we believe and love this organization! Are you or your children or have you ever been a member of the 4-H?

Enjoy every minute my friends!

 

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