Last week I forced myself to put together an iPhoto album from my massive file of summer vacation pictures. I try to do this once a season and enlist the girls help with caption-writing -- the final product could rival a John Irving novel for how many exclamation points they make me use -- and usually this is all I need to do to feel like I've sufficiently locked away the memories for safekeeping. But this time, I added a new album to the mix. It's a collection of our "car quizzes" (above) which we've relied on as road trip boredom busters for the past few years. The quizzes are exactly as they sound: an assortment of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or true or false questions about wherever we're headed or returning from. My initial goal for the 828-mile trip back from South Carolina was to write a straightforward list of 100 things we did on vacation, but the girls, who have a sixth sense for dutiful, linear, decidedly un-fun games, of course refused, instead begging for quiz after quiz after quiz after quiz. It wasn't until I got home and looked through all the questions that I realized I had a keepsake that was every bit as revealing as a boring old list.
The Accidental Keepsake
The Accidental Keepsake
The Accidental Keepsake
Last week I forced myself to put together an iPhoto album from my massive file of summer vacation pictures. I try to do this once a season and enlist the girls help with caption-writing -- the final product could rival a John Irving novel for how many exclamation points they make me use -- and usually this is all I need to do to feel like I've sufficiently locked away the memories for safekeeping. But this time, I added a new album to the mix. It's a collection of our "car quizzes" (above) which we've relied on as road trip boredom busters for the past few years. The quizzes are exactly as they sound: an assortment of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or true or false questions about wherever we're headed or returning from. My initial goal for the 828-mile trip back from South Carolina was to write a straightforward list of 100 things we did on vacation, but the girls, who have a sixth sense for dutiful, linear, decidedly un-fun games, of course refused, instead begging for quiz after quiz after quiz after quiz. It wasn't until I got home and looked through all the questions that I realized I had a keepsake that was every bit as revealing as a boring old list.