Every May for the past couple of years we have gone away for the May long weekend. This year, we don’t have all the kids so we decided on a spur of the moment trip this weekend. We usually head to Montreal to see friends, or we have gone to Kingston a couple of times (visited Fort Henry where Rob worked in University). This year we decided to head to Upper New York State – Palmyra – which has a bunch of historic sites for us to visit about our Church.

The kids seem to like “road trips” – which is good, as we are planning on a big one to the Outer Banks, NC this summer which will be about 15 hours! This one was a little bit shorter – under 4 hours. The weather wasn’t the best, but we had a great time. The kids loved the variety of walking through forests and up hills, to watching movies and videos, to seeing orignal homes and printing shops. We also went to the factory outlets for a bit of shopping, enjoyed the hotel hot tub, went to the town pizzeria for dinner and crashed and watched some movies. Perfect kind of weekend.

Our kids are exposed to many different view points, attitudes and religions. I have my own beliefs, which of course, I want to teach my kids. But they also have other parents who have their own viewpoints and teach them other things too – some hand in hand with what I think and teach – some completely opposite. I only hope that my kids will grow up to have an understanding of many things and find that they are able to make their own decisions in their life about what they want to believe, based on their own experiences. It’s funny because it is often criticized that teaching religion to kids is sort of a “brainwashing”. I find it so ironic that often the brainwashing I’ve seen is to convince them that religion is “bad”.

I got to try out my new camera on this weekend trip too. Got some nice pictures, although I need to figure out how everything really works! Here are some of my favorite shots of the weekend:

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