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Summer is such a fun time to spend quality time with our children. Summer will be here before you know it. We always try to start planning summer activities around this time of year. It can get very expensive when you have several children or even one child, so we are always looking for ways to save money. Planning is key! We want to spend some good quality time with our children but without breaking the bank. Here are a few great ideas that we incorporate for our summer planning.
1.) Look up Free Days: 
In our area they have several free days for the museums, the zoo, festivals, and events. This is key when saving money when you have several people going. It saves a lot of money. We also pack lunches for the zoo and any event or activity that allows you to do so. We bring coins for fountains or the coin machines, the kids love making a wish at the fountain at the zoo here and its cheap.
2.) Movie Date:
One of our favorite things to do in the summer is to see a great movie. We look for dollar days. We have one movie theatre here that is only $3 a person versus $9/$10 a person, that is a lot of money we are saving. Do your research for location, prices, and ratings. We are fortunate to have a movie theatre here that has dollar days, in a great location and updated. They also allow you to bring in snacks as well, so we bring a bag with snacks and water bottles in and enjoy a great movie at a great price!
3.) Water Theme Park Dates:
One great way to spend a full summer day is at a water park! Water Parks can be very expensive but we always look up the discounted days and that saves our family a lot of money. It is usually during the week, so it is less crowded. We pack a lunch also and bring plenty of water. We bring our wagon and pack it with lunches, water bottles, towels and extra clothes. Our wagon, (you can find here, click on pic) which I absolutely love is such a big help with loading everything we need in. This is one of my favorite products that we have purchased. We use it for park days, zoo days, water park days and baseball games. It just makes every trip so much easier. It folds nicely and fits great into the back of our pilot. It is reasonable priced and it saves us so many extra trips from going back and forth to our vehicle.
Park Date: 
One inexpensive great way to spend a summer day is at a community park. We have great parks here with tons of picnic tables. We use our wagon on these days also to help bring a packed picnic, watermelon, water bottles and a great blanket. Also water parks are great on those really hot days, the kids love to run though the water, be able to play on the playground, and be able to enjoy a great picnic as well. We use insulated lunch bags to keep our food from spoiling. Love the one we use,(get it here, click on pic) it’s a large size one that can hold what we need.
One Thing I like to do is, to look up one of our community websites and search for free events. Here, we have free fishing clinics, free kids golf lesson, free kid’s pass for our theme park, kids Tennis lesson free, and free recreational center and pool entry. There is also great story times at the library which we love and is free. There is so much fun things to do this summer and it is a great way to spend quality time with the kids without breaking the bank. I hope this info was helpful, please send us some of y’alls great summer ideas!
