Three Caches, One Day

Yes, I really did hit three caches in one day! But that was without the six older kids, which I guess it kind of cheating. Everything went so much faster without temper tantrums, whining, or required snacking stops. One of the caches, we saw a deer even, so amazing! Of course, my camera was still at home, so I am afraid I have no pictures to share.

And today, we hid our second cache! Using our first ammo box, and putting Kate's travel bug Penguin in it. We found a very good location, goog enough that even we had trouble seeing it after hiding it and knowing exactly where it was. Looking forward to seeing who the FTF will be.

Last night, I stayed up really late to make post partum pads and new born diapers for a friend's baby shower. I ended up with six pads and two newborn prefolds. I was very proud at myself. Somehow it was important to me to make those for her, as opposed to buying something. I had asked her whether she would need the pads, I knew she used cloth diapers, but wasn't sure whether she would use cloth pads. She did :-)

Off to bed now, tomorrow I'll try to post some pictures, too late now to edit and upload them. But I had to brag about my three caches :-)

Oh, one more thing, I got stopped by the border patrol on our local interstate. I didn't have my green card with me, so when I saw the road block, I soooooooooo hoped that they wouldn't ask for it. I opened the window and tried to look extremely innocent (stop laughing!). It must have worked, because me wide eyed 'Hello!' received a 'Have a nice day, madam' while he waved me on my way. I was thinking that it was good that I didn't have all those ammo boxes in the van, who knows what he would have thought if I had all those stacked next to me. Somehow I am not sure whether he would have believed in my innocence or would have accepted my lame excuse about geocaching LOL.

Third To Find

In geocaching land, it is kind of a sport to try to be First To Find on a new cache. So when a new cache turned up in our neck of the woods, we decided that we were going to log our first FTF. My plan was to leave immediately after breakfast, and get there nice and early. Of course, as usual, life got in the way, and we didn't get to the cache till 1pm or so.

The roads to the cache gradually got worse. First normal paved roads, then smaller paved roads. The paved roads changed into dirt roads, and the last few miles were on a dirt road that was barely wider than my van. I kept praying to the geocaching gods that we wouldn't have any cars coming in the opposite direction, because there was no way that that would have fitted, and I didn't really want to back up for three miles on a tiny dirt road.

We finally arrived at the parking lot, where we found two cars already parked. I knew we were out of luck on the FTF when I noticed the license plate on the first one 'GEOCACH'. Hmmmm, something told me that that was the vehicle of a fellow geocacher. I hoped that the other car maybe wasn't a geocacher, so at least we could be STF.

Got out, admired the nice pond, and started on the hike. On our way to the first waypoint, we met another couple of hikers. One of the kids remarked that they had a GPS too. And yes, there were our fellow geocachers. The FTFer, and the STFer. It was fun to meet them though, and put faces to the screen names. It turns out that one of them had done our own cache that morning and was FTF on our cache. She was in possesion of Tara's travelbug BunBun. The other one planned on doing our cache in the afternoon.

Talked a bit, and then both went our merry way. This was a multi cache, so we didn't get the real coordinates, but instead, the first coordinates led us to a clear plexiglass ring with more coordinates. Do you know how hard it is to find a four inch plexiglass ring in the middle of a HUGE wood? Yes, very difficult. Amazingly difficult. But thanks to a hint of the other geocachers, we eventually found the first ring, which made it easier to find the second one, because now at least we knew what we were looking for. The second ring gave us the coordinates for the cache. Which was another hard to find one, but we did it! Third To Find :-) Next time, we'll try to improve on that and be Second To Find maybe LOL

The pond had a wonderful beach, we played there for quite a while before heading home. And the best thing was that the hike back to the car wasn't even in the dark! Amazing huh? LOL We did get lost on the ride home, in the dark, but that's another story.

Ammo Boxes, Apples, and Potatoes!

Yes, I know that's a weird combination, but it describes pretty much what we did today :-)

This morning, the ammo boxes got delivered. Two big cardboard boxes, filled with eleven metal ammo boxes, in a few different sizes. Now we can get serious about hiding more caches! The kids were excited and had to open every single one of them. We decided to let them air out, so our deck was filled with all those ammo boxes, I am wondering what the neighbors were thinking :-) They might be very polite to us now LOL. The ammo boxes came with an interesting catalog... I don't think I'll buy any of their bumper stickers.

Today was the first day of fall, and we celebrated it by going apple picking. One of our yearly fall rituals, we have an apple orchard close by. We even could hike there from our house (about an hour when I hike by myself), but I took the easy way out and loaded every one in the car. We picked a few pecks of apples, those apple trees produce a tad better than our own. I started planting apple trees when we bought this house, and the total harvest has been exactly ONE apple over the last five years! Maybe next year will be better?

We also celebrated the first day of fall with a cake, my kids had convinced me that that was the proper way to celebrate :-) OK, any excuse for a party, right?

I spent some time digging up more potatoes. I just love the way potatoes grow, it's like digging for treasure. You never know how many there will be till you start digging. This bed had quite a few, and we had a bunch of baked potatoes for dinner. I also harvested some tomatoes, and froze them, they were the yellow peach ones. I love tomatoes that aren't boring red :-). And the most amazing thing, I mowed the lawn!!!! OK, maybe not the whole lawn. Not even half of it. But the part that's the most visible from the street, which was in very bad need of mowing. It looks so much better now.

Night Time Caching

Yes, we did it again :-) We started out later than expected, because my friend's furnace was being fixed, and that took longer than expected. And somehow, we ended up in the dark yet again. I keep thinking that we don't need flash lights, and don't even tell the kids to bring them. The kids are smarter than I am, and bring them anyway :-)

We did a test run for my friend's new cache. Maybe it wasn't the right time of the day to do it, my kids fought even more than normal. It's amazing how many complaints they can have about each other. And I think we need six more GPSs, so they don't have to fight about who gets to hold it :-)

I was looking at the Letterboxing web site, and discovered that there also were two letterboxes hidden in that park. Figured we could do them when we were out there anyway. It's kind of like geocaching, but without the goodies, just a stamp and a log book. You are supposed to stamp your own personal stamp in the logbook. Today, we just used Tara's, which she had gotten in a cache as a trading item.

Cees told me that he never, ever, ever, wants to do a letterbox again! Because there wasn't anything in it. He is in it for the loot I guess LOL. I think it also didn't help that Tim found both letterboxes. But at least Cees found the cache we were looking for, so that improved his mood a bit.

Sylvia always enjoys the hikes, it's nice that she is too young to fight with her siblings :-) Still, I am looking forward to next year, when she will be hiking on her own. Hard to imagine! But I know it will happen way too fast!

Just Some Pictures

Jane playing at a local creek

Same creek, a few days later after the remainders of Ivan passed us

Today's cache, a very big sand hill.

Ten Caches!

Found our tenth cache today! Out of the single digits, into the double ones. Woohoo!

It was a nice hike, uphill as usual to a pond somewhere at the top of a mountain. We met a snake and a toad, and Kate asked every one we met 'Are you a geocacher too???', only to be met with blank stares till I explained it to them :-) Maybe I should make up little business cards with the geocaching web link on them. I'll put it on my to-do list.

Nobody found our cache yet, or if they did, they didn't log it. Curious to see how long it will be before the First To Find will be there.

After the cache, we went to our homeschool's annual 'Not Back to School!' picnic. The kids had a blast, apart from Erik, who kept wanting to go home for some reason. He would come up to me and state in a firm voice 'We are going to leave in FIVE minutes!' Hmmmm, do you think I shouldn't give them 5-minute warnings before we leave somewhere? LOL He finally found the closet with board games and puzzles, and from then on was happy to play with those, and almost did not want to go home at all anymore.

I even managed to bake cinnamon raisin bread for the picnic, although I cheated and did an overnight sponge rise, as opposed to a normal, slow double rise which I usually do. Nobody complained though :-) Off to bed now, I'll try to upload some hiking pictures tomorrow, too tired now.

We Are Official!

I was bummed, because we couldn't geocache because it was raining, raining, and raining. I know we could have done it in the rain, but somehow, that just didn't appeal to me. But this afternoon, the rain finally let up. It was kind of too late to hit a new cache, but the timing was perfect for finishing up our own cache. I had the 'Congratulations, you found it!' sheet laminated at Staples, and I had a flash light I wanted to add to the cache. So, off we went, just Tara, Sylvia, to get our cache ready for listing.

Nice hike, wet trails, but not too muddy. The brook had grown a lot though. Nothing was left of the nice, friendly brook that my kids had been playing in. It was a raging body of water now, very impressive! We added the stuff to the cache, made some more pictures and went to the health food store for a celebratory chocolate cookie and lemonade :-)

At home we listed it, and got the cache approved, so here it is, our very first official cache!

Tara's travel bug BunBun is waiting for the First Finder, curious to see how long it will take for some one to log it. This is fun, now we have to decide where to hide our next one! I ordered a bunch of ammo boxes, because I knew we were going to want to hide more geocaches :-)

And another official event, I got my new business its very own web site http://www.deerbaby-naturalfamily.com ! I am particularly proud of the page, 'Top Ten Reasons to Wear Your Baby'. I have lots of other pages planned, hoping to add them over the next few weeks.

Sylvia still does the roll over on belly thing, and then is stuck, because she can't roll back yet. I hope she figures it out soon :-)

Found!

My friend found the cache, phew, we must have done something right. She found a slug too, inside the box, maybe the cheap rubbermaid containers from KMart were not that high quality after all...

Can I admit that I went on line and ordered a bunch of ammo boxes? I feel so weird to have done that, who would think that an anti gun person like I am would ever order ammo boxes? Not only that, but I know that this will result in getting regular deliveries of survivalist catalogs. Just what I needed :-|

This morning, we did a walk for World Breastfeeding Week with our local LLL. We didn't walk much, but had a wonderful time, hanging out and getting the word out about breastfeeding. We had a banner, which hopefully was read by lots of people. Now if we had been organized enough to get more than one sponsor, things would have been perfect :-)

This morning, I harvested some potatoes, which we ate for dinner. I just love eating fresh veggies from our own garden.

Hid Our First Cache!

We went to a local park today, to hide our first cache! How exciting! We looked all around the house for little trinkets to put in, I even registered two books at BookCrossing.Com. I hope to have one of my friends look for it tomorrow, and our homeschool group on Thursday. If that both works out, I'll post it on the geocaching web site. It was fun trying to come up with a good location. But it was harder than I thought to actually HIDE the box in the woods. It seemed so obvious! Hope we have hidden it well enough. Luckily those are big woods and a small box, so that should help :-)

The kids played in the creek again, they had a lot of fun. Erik found an empty small soda bottle, and kept throwing it in the water, looking at how the stream carried it away, through tiny water falls and such. Then picked it up at the end of the traject (where there were even more rocks, so soda bottle couldn't get through) and did the whole thing over again. Kept him entertained for ages.

I have two girls on a sleep over. We first had bitterly fighting about who could go, since there was only room for 2 out of 3 in their van. We ended up flipping a coin because there was no consensus to be reached.

Now the house is so quiet with only five kids ;-) I especially miss the fighting that Erik and Kate usually do :-)

All that hiking really wears you out...

Rolling Over!

She has figured out how to roll over from her back to her belly! She had been close for a while, but today things clicked and she did it a bunch of times. Now the next step will be to roll back I guess, from her belly to her back, she hasn't mastered that yet, so she gets kind of stuck on her belly :-)

She pooped in the toilet yesterday, but that was by accident.

And she is laughing out loud, I love that sound. Usually when one of her siblings is entertaining her.

She is growing up so fast!

Did the library today and a local park to find a site for our own geocache to hide. Maybe we'll hide it tomorrow, or at least sometimes this week. The kids played in a creek there, nice, cold, shallow water and tons of rocks. Perfect for kids.

Another Night Time Hike

But at least this time we were smart, and had brought flash lights. I just knew we were not going to need them, because we would be back at the car long before dark. I was wrong. But we did find out that it's way easier to hike in the dark when you actually bring flash lights. I think flash lights are going to be a obligatory item on our hiking supplies. Even if we know we won't need them :-)

So why were we out that late? As usual, life got in the way, it's amazing how life keeps doing that. In the morning, we had our very first official homeschool meeting for the new school year, so couldn't go geocaching then. Of course told every one about it, wanting to get some more people hooked on it :-) It was nice not to have the kids stuck in school, but be out playing in a park instead.

Cees had to go to a birthday party in the afternoon, so we had to wait for him to be picked up before going out. Then a friend had computer problems, which took a bit of time to resolve, followed by Kate accidentally pushing Tara into a wall. No, I don't know either how you accidentally can push some one into a wall, but Tara was very hurt and upset. We did finally manage to set out though, with one kid missing (Cees), but an extra kid instead Mesa, who we ended up with after the homeschool meeting.

They were all excited because we had two travel bugs to put into the cache. Sonic the Hedgehog and Tim's very first travel bug Gnome Girl. We found the trail head pretty easily, and set out caching. The trail wasn't too hard, just a few stream crossings, but it still took longer than I had expected. At first we forgot Sonic in the car, but we realized that before hiking too far, so I sent Tim back to get him. We finally made it to the cache area, but we had a hard time finding the cache. It was starting to get darker, but I just couldn't abandon the search now that we were so close.

Tim found the cache!!!! Under dead birch tree #67 or so. It's amazing how many birch trees there can be in just any part of the woods. So we had to spent some time taking stuff out, putting stuff in, and having a snack before heading back out. It was getting darker. And darker. Kate and Erik started crying, I think they remembered the more traumatic night time hike without flash lights, but with mud. We got out the flash lights before it was strictly needed, mostly to calm them down. It helped, and we did make it back to the car safely. The flash lights made all the difference, to make it a nice, relaxed night time hike, as opposed to a stressful one.

Yesterday, I did boring stuff like groceries and such, but today we went caching again! Went to Shelob's Lair where Cees dropped off his Spider Boy Travel Bug It was in the middle of nowhere, on the top of a mountain, so that meant hiking up, up, up, and did I mention up? The kids did great, and in the end Kate told me 'This was an easy hike, it wasn't even dark!' LOL. I didn't think it was that easy, but glad she disagreed, since almost all the caches here seem to be hidden on steep trails. I wonder why? ;-)

I had been really organized and had thrown lots of veggies / grains and tvp in the crockpot before I left, so I didn't have to cook dinner when I came home, it was done already. Yummy!

Adventures in Geocaching Land

Wow! That was quite an adventure. One of those 'They will tell stories about this geocaching hunt to their kids. Uphill both ways!'. It started out pretty innocent. 'Easy 2.5 mile round trip to a cache at a pond'. How hard could that be? The terrain rated 3 stars, which sounded high for the description, but hey, it sounded so easy, no problem.

We found the site pretty easily, after driving back and forth a bit. Drove down the dirt road, hoping that there would be a spot to turn somewhere, didn't really have to back up the van to get back to the road. If only that would have been the biggest issue of the day!

Found a nice parking spot, where a trail got off the dirt road. Got out the GPS, looked which direction it told us to go, and decided that the trail off the dirt road was the right one to take. We were wrong. It wasn't the right one at all, but it took us too much climbing over fallen down trees and branches to realize that. By the time we were sure this was the wrong trail, there was no way I would be able to make it back down that way with the baby in the sling. Neither Kate, nor Erik would have been able to do that one back down either, so we decided that bushwhacking was the way to go. Wrong again!

We bushwhacked, and bushwhacked, and bushwhacked, and bushwhacked. Kept losing satellite reception. There was much whining and gnashing of teeth. Lots of complaining. Lots of crying and screaming. Although I have to admit there was less fighting, just because they were too busy to complain to me I think. And did I mention the whining?

Kate kept saying things like 'I don't like geocaching anymore!', 'I wish we were home now!', 'This is too hard!'. Cees was convinced that we were going to die here in the woods. Tim freaked out about stepping on poisonous mushrooms. Did I mention the whining?

The terrain sometimes improved for a bit, only to worsen again. Fallen down trees, branches sticking out every where, especially on kids eyes height, poisonous mushrooms, moose scat, challenging ledges, deer scat, prickly blackberry bushes, mud, ferns, and trees. For a moment we actually found kind of a trail, only to lose it again. The kids were not impressed. Cees helpfully kept scaring the little ones with stories about all the terrible things that can happen to kids who get lost in the woods.

We did eventually make it back to the trail, but that was after at least a mile, if not more of bushwacking. At some point the fersn were higher than Erik, and he just stood there and bawled. My friend M was with us, and she actually ended up carrying Kate and/or Erik for quite a bit, because the bushwacking was just a tad too challenging for them. But once we made it back to the trail, the kids were totally fine, running around to look at puddles, sowing m&m's to grow m&m trees, and collecting rocks to take home.

We hiked for quite a while on the trail and made it to the cache site. Finding the cache was not as hard as some others, and the kids enjoyed figuring out what to take and what to leave. We are now the proud owners of a VT Moose bumper sticker on our van... And a glow in the dark frog on the wall of our bedroom... It was a nice location, peaceful pond, in the middle of nowhere.

We ate a snack, and started on our way back, because we didn't want to hike back in the dark. But there was going to be more than enough time to make it to the car before it got dark. Wrong again! Not only was it dark before we were even 1/3 on the way back to the car, but this was real life dark, pitch dark, can't even see your own fingers kind of dark. We found that M's cell phone and my GPS both emitted just enough of a glow to almost see where we were going. Almost... Still missed a lot of mud, and we all had at least one encounter with an suddenly attacking mud puddle. Kate's shoe got stuck in the mud, but her foot got out... So then we had to try to find that shoe in the pitch dark... She freaked out!

We did eventually make it to the car. My friend M offered to treat us to dinner, so we drove to Friendly's, hoping that they would still be open. Phew, they were, even although there was almost nobody there anymore. We tracked a lot of mud on their freshly mopped floors. I felt so bad, the floor was nice and shiny and perfect, till we stepped onto those wet floors with our muddy boots.... Every step was splash, more mud!

We came home around 11pm I think. Kicked the kids to bed and had some nice and quiet computer time till 2:30am... Then got up early to bake cinnamon raisin bread for today's LLL meeting. I considered skipping that, but I just couldn't, the LLL meeting wouldn't be the same without my cinnamon raisin bread. Oh, we also managed to get the house cleaned up enough to pretend to be kind of organized :-)

Now it's raining, so it looks like we can't do a cache tomorrow.

Click here for our log note (with pictures) at geocaching.com. Click here for my friend's side of the story.

Writing the cache log. Note how I am not wearing my hiking shoes, because it was going to be such an easy hike....
I was wrong yet again :-)

Long Day, Short Post

Yet another link to a cache find. We almost didn't find it, good that some other cachers helped us! We met a porcupine, of which you can see a fuzzy pic in the link :-)

Off to bed now, the day was long with Jane waking up covered in blood (still not sure what happened, maybe she scratched open an insect bite or so?), the washer dumping a few gallons of water on the basement (what a mess!!!), new shoes for almost every one, quick visit to kmart and pet store, long geocaching hunt, including getting lost twice. Maybe I'll post more details tomorrow, too tired right now, I wonder why :-)

THREE Months!!!

Yesterday, Sylvia turned three months old, a quarter year already. How did that happen???? She celebrated by going geocaching :-) We found two caches at once (link has pictures), and they were hidden really neat, in the fork of a pine tree, what a perfect hiding spot! The cache contained another kind of cache, a traveling globe, which is both a kind of travel bug and a cache. Effectively this is a moving cache, so this increased our cache finds to five instead of four!

The kids have decided that we will have to find eight caches before we can hide our own. Of course, we are getting stuff together already to hide our own, want to do it soon after finding our eight caches. Not sure yet where we are going to hide ours, will have to think more on that.

We found our very first travel bug Ted E. Bear'.Travel bugs are items that you can ask people to take from cache to cache, often with a specific traveling goal, or just to go anywhere, like Ted. Tara made sure to buckle him in in the car, so his owner would know that he traveled safely (yes, we took a pic :-) At home, she showed him our pond, and prepared a nice bed for him, so he would be comfortable while he slept here. We ordered a bunch of travel bug tags, so that we can make our own travel bugs soon. Cees is going to have one to get to Hawaii, since he really wants to go there, and his mean mom still hasn't let him :-) Now at least his travel bug can make it there :-)

Sylvia really enjoys the hikes in the woods, we named her well. She hangs out in the sling and just observes everything around her. Once in a while she nurses, but not even that often anymore, she sure is growing up, waaaah! She keeps outgrowing diapers and clothes too. And we had to replace her car seat (the Britax Handle with Care infant seat) with the Britax Roundabout! It's amazing how fast she grows!

She is almost rolling over, but not quite yet. Lots of drooling, but no teeth. Lots of smiling and laughing, and she is very talkative. Very social baby.

Yesterday, after the geocaching, we went to our local ice cream place to celebrate Sylvia's 3mo birthday. This was the last time this year, because tomorrow, they will close for the season! I don't want summer to be over yet!

Today, I went grocery shopping, and unlike Chris and Sue, I am not telling exactly what I bought! :-P And let's just say that it was less than $200... About 35 cents less... And that didn't even involve any chocolate! But there were lots of organic items, do I get bonus points for that? I thought not.

Yet Another Cache

Not much energy to post right now, want to be off to bed. Click here for today's geocaching adventure, with a bunch of great pictures.

After geocaching, we went to the thrift store and to Staples, not much time was spent at home today. Now I just want to go to bed! More text and pictures tomorrow.

Oh, and the grand prize about yesterday's raptor goes to Gretchen, who correctly identified it as a red-tailed hawk! Or at least, I hope it's correct, the picture looked similar to the red-tailed hawk ones.

Montshire Museum

We spent a day at the Montshire Museum in Vermont. It is our local science museum, and full of great exhibits for the kids. We were supposed to go for only a few hours, but ended up staying the whole day. Luckily, I brought enough food. This was the first time we went since Sylvia was born, she enjoyed sitting in the sling and looking at all the action around her.

I managed to keep them inside till lunch, but after that, they went outside and played in the amazing water park, never to come back inside again. I had been smart enough to ask them to bring bathing suits, although Tim said he wasn't going to get wet. So he ended up going home in wet clothes, oh well. At least I had brought an extra towel, just in case :-)

We were outside when a raptor was flying over. No idea what raptor it was, but I was able to snap a picture, hoping to be able to identify it at home. I am not good at identifying raptors in flight. Still haven't gotten around to getting out my bird books, so bonus points for any one who correctly indentifies this raptor!

Today was a quiet day at home and at a friend's house. She has a toddler and a baby a bit older than sylvia, so it's always fun hanging out together. She got me some Happy Mama Spray, an aroma therapy spray for new mamas, to help with the baby blues. It smells fruity, with a touch of ginger. I like the smell, but I like even more that I have some one who got this for me, as a special gift :-)

I had had a few days that I never got around to cooking dinner, but my CSA box still had arrived. So today I was totally committed to making a dinner somehow. I ended up making carrot soup, with the thelp of the crock pot. I felt so oganized, when my soup was cooking in the crock pot, and I could do other things, knowing that dinner was ready already!

Hair Cutting

Well, we hadn't had one for quite a long time, so I guess we really were due for one. We used to have them 'all the time', it's amazing my kids had any hair left. I secretly suspect that I am breeding a new generation of hairdressers. But they seemed to have found other ways to entertain themselves, so I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn't happen again. I was wrong.

I asked Kate why the heck she had cut his hair.
'Erik ASKED me to!'
I wondered 'Have you ever heard of the word "NO!"'?
'No!', came her reply.
Oh well, it will grow again, I just will need to cut it so that it actually is straight, but at least it's done on a boy this time. Still remember when Tara managed to cut her own hair so much, that she ended up with a crew cut, so she looked like a boy for quite a while.

We went geocaching again yesterday, and found the cache that was unfindable last time. It helped that we put in the right coordinates this time... We had a friend with us, who was actually the one who found the cache, without even looking at the GPS. It brought us close, but we couldn't find the right old log that the cache was supposed to be hidden under. We could find 42 other old logs though, amazing how many old logs there can be in the woods ;-)

Last time, I noticed on the pictures, that Cees was wearing his 'Baptist church' shirt from when he went to Vacation Bible School a few years ago. A friend pointed out that now people would wonder why the baptists left a naked barbie... This time we didn't have that shirt, and didn't post pictures, but Jane left miss Clavell's clothes, so now we'll be known as the people who left the nun's clothes. Hmmmm, maybe it can be a new trend, 'took key chain, left my bra' ;-) Maybe not :-)

Tim found another deck of card in the cache, he has decided to start a deck of cards collection. Cees had a parachute ninja this time, which went well with the Japanese coin he found last time. He will try to start a Japanese collection. The others didn't have a common theme with their last find. But they all were happy with their new 'treasure' :-)