O Beloved Weekends!

This past Saturday was a lot of fun. After bringing Early Bird Levi into the "big bed" to have some morning playtime with Mommy and Daddy, we all got up and had banana pancakes for breakfast. Then we went geocaching! It was a beautiful day outside. I am convinced that people who choose to live in Florida must do so for the spring weather!

Here are the boys and I with a cache. This is the 2nd (and final) stage of a multi-cache. (The first stage was a fake rock with coordinates for the next stage inside.) It took us down a pretty little wooded path to this pond. Sunny day, light breeze - it was gorgeous!

Levi's favorite mode of transportation!

My handsome, helpful big boy

The loves of my life!

That cache happened to be near the air museum, so we stopped to look at the planes outside. The boys had a blast running between and under all the different aircraft. Drake also got to practice his reading skills on the placard signs describing the different planes, and he was pleasantly surprised that he could sound out most of the airplane names.

Mommy and the boys at the air park

Drake and Levi checking out the F-15. I think. (I'll have to check with Adam when he gets home from work tonight to make sure I'm right about the plane. The obvious difference between F-15s and F-16s is that one of them has two of those tail fin things that stick up in the back and the other has just one. Now I can't remember which is which...)

Daddy and his boys

Adventures in Geocaching!

I've mentioned geocaching a few times on here, so I thought I'd give you all a peek into this fun family activity! Geocaching is sort of like a world-wide treasure hunt in which you use a GPS (Global Positioning System) to hunt for coordinates where someone has hidden a "cache" or container. Anyone with a GPS can participate, both hiding and finding caches. You must first log in to the geocaching website and register - it's free! Then you can do a search for caches in your area and load the coordinates into your GPS for the ones you want to look for. After that, you're ready to go geocaching! (You would be amazed how many caches are hidden all over your city or town and the surrounding areas!)

When you find a cache, you sign your name and date on the log (paper or booklet) inside, and if there are items inside, you can trade for them. We often find things like toys, small games, coins (foreign or specialty), carabiners, magnets, and other knick-knacky stuff. We recently traded for a dollar bill folded origami-style to look like an elephant! Creative stuff. Some items are "trackable" online - they're called "travel bugs" (or "geo-coins" if they're coins) - which means they have a special number issued and attached to them, and each time a person finds and re-hides the item, its progress is tracked online. It's fun to find items that originated on another continent, and it's fun, also, to place trackable items in faraway places. Adam has placed trackable items from here into caches in both Washington state and Washington D.C.!

Some caches are larger, like ammo boxes or large glass mayonnaise jars. These larger caches are called "traditional" caches. Some are smaller, like film container-sized and even smaller. These are called "micro" caches. There's a picture at the bottom of this post of a cache so tiny it's called a "nano" - all that fits inside is a tiny roll of paper. There are also other types of caches, but they're more rare. One is called a "multi" cache, because the coordinates lead to the first in a series of caches that can only be discovered by finding them in order. We also did one recently that required solving a mathematical puzzle to figure out the coordinates to the cache!

(For a more extensive explanation of geocaching from Wikipedia, see here.)

Anyway, once you have a GPS, geocaching is totally free, other than the gas you use driving to your locations. So it's super inexpensive, and so much fun! The benefits are many. We like the thrill of the hunt - working together as a family (or often, a daddy and son) to be sneaky and track down a hidden object! And it's good excercise when you're out walking or hiking around. We also like the fact that we find new parks and cool places that we didn't even know were there before! Finding out where in the country or the world trackable items have come from is another fun aspect! And once in awhile, we've bumped into other geocachers and made some "friends" in the geocaching world.

Here are some pictures of recent geocaching adventures:

Adam and the boys did a lot of caches on Nov. 28th. (It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I decided to venture out on Black Friday. Whew. That was an experience. Don't know if I'll try that again anytime soon. Not being much of a shopper or a "crowds" person, it's not exactly up my alley...the only alluring factor is the good deals! But anyway, I digress.) Here is one they found at the beach!

One in the woods/brush...

...and one in some rocks!

Here are some of the treasures they found and traded for! (It's always a good idea to keep a little bag of "junk" in the vehicle when you're going out geocaching - trading fodder is quite useful sometimes!)

Drake and Adam went out again a few days later. They're holding a couple of trackable geo-coins they found. The object on the floor in the center is an empty turtle shell they found while hiking around that day! Pretty cool! None of us had ever seen one before.

Here are the boys and I after finding a tricky and creative cache on a short geocaching expedition after church. The name of the cache was simply "89" - it turned out to be a large, flat magnet on the side of an electrical box with alpha-numeric stickers reading "AT9". (They totally had us for a long time because the "fake" stickers on the cache magnet looked a lot like the real stickers used by the power company to mark the boxes, and you couldn't even tell the magnet was there!) So this cache consisted of only a magnet, with a paper "log" on the back to sign.

Here's Adam displaying the nano-cache he finally found (on the screen of the GPS)! He and friend Dave had been looking for this particular nano, off and on, for over a year and a half! Very tricky. It's magnetic and completely blends in with its surroundings!

Here's a close-up view. Wow! Now that's tiny. (Adam calls this one his "nano nemesis"!) This was his second nano find. The little white roll on the side is the tiny paper log that fits inside...and it was really a tight fit!

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So that's a quick glimpse into the world of geocaching! I encourage anyone with a GPS to give it a try - it's lots of fun!

Busy two weeks!

Ten days since my last post? Yikes! It's now the end of a busy couple of weeks! Here's a look at some of the highlights since I dropped off the face of the earth...

Grandpa and Levi playing outside

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Drake's class took a field trip to the pumpkin patch! Drake is in the middle row to the far right. It happened to fall on a Thursday morning, so I had to work, but our kind neighbor, Jennifer (Tyler's mom), gave my parents and Levi a ride to the pumpkin patch so they could be there with Drake. It made his day! And I think Grandpa and Grandma had a good time too!

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The last night Dad was here, we (Dad, Mom, Drake, and I) went mini golfing! It was great fun! One hole was particularly difficult for Drake, and after numerous (very numerous) hits, he finally got the ball in. He joyfully called out, "HOLE IN 250! NEXT!"

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My parents are aspiring Polka dancers, and so I got to learn a few of the steps from my dad. A lot of fun, and left me surprisingly out of breath!

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Adam and Dave dressed to impress...for a night of fishing, that is!

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Adam, Dave, and Drake went geocaching and came back with some pretty cool finds! (We need to do this more often. Lately we've gotten a bit out of the habit, but it's a cheap and super-fun family activity!)

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Since I didn't get to go on the pumpkin patch field trip, we went back a few days later (Grandma, the boys, and I) and picked out some pumpkins that we'll carve when it gets a little closer to Halloween.

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Grandma and Levi playing on the slide.

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Well, that wasn't the deepest and most thought-provoking post ever, but better than nothing at this point! So here are some of the logistics pertaining to all that random mumbo-jumbo: my parents arrived about two weeks ago, my dad left about a week ago, and my mom left yesterday. Our "TDY'd" friend Dave will be with us for two more weekends after this one before returning home to Alaska. I hope to be posting a little more frequently, now that life is returning to a slower pace. We have had a crazy - but awesome - past two weeks!