Quote of the Day

When I leave the house, I often tell the kids 'OK, guys, don't burn down the house!'
Today I said that to Sylvia and Kate who were playing in the living room.
Sylvia replies in a very sweet voice. 'We won't, mama. We are good babies!'

Feh!

I seem to have acquired some stupid stomach bug. Not even that sick of it, but it means I won't be able to make it to aikido. I don't think it would be good to have an attack while I am on the mat.

Another not-fun thing is if the kids get it too, it is not going to be a pretty time. I'd better go spray them all with lysol right now!

Baking Biscuits

Just found out Tara baked a batch of biscuits, they are very good. Did I mention how I love having older kids around who do all the baking?

I am baking our daily bread, I have increased the amount of it, so now the four good - sized loaves last us almost two days.

Back to studying go ^^

Wise Words of Warning

My good friend sent me some additional advice for new geocachers out there. All the common sense things which I figured everyone would know and do anyway, just like me (*cough, cough*)

Good advice for the people for whom it does not come naturally to be prepared (unlike me, of course ^^) Hey! At least I told them to bring a flashlight, can I get a few bonus points for that? :)



I'm "the friend" who got Karen into this, years ago now. My family has done over 1000 caches.....and still going strong! The things we've seen and found, right in our own community, still amaze me. If you aren't geocaching, you are missing out on a whole world of beautiful places, hidden treasures and secret handshakes :)

I'm commenting so as to not neglect *practical* aspects of geocaching......ie: you can avoid some of Karen's more daunting adventures with a few simple precautions :)



First off, your car needs an emergency kit. Yes, one of those medical ones is good (bring bee sting and poison ivy sticks), but I mean a "we're stuck here and it's dark" kit. Blankets, towels, dry clothing (I have t-shirts and sweatpants in a range to fit multiple kids), socks (lots!), water bottles and energy bars. During the winter include hats/gloves etc. I pick things that can just be left in the car for several months at a time.



Secondly, flashlights, flashlights, flashlights.........and more flashlights.



Thirdly, batteries, batteries, batteries.........are you getting the idea? Good, then repeat with the words cell phone and maps too lol



Lastly, be willing to give up. Sometimes you have to call it quits and I've found if the giving up thought crosses my mind, we really need to begin seriously considering it right then and there. Some caches and some locations are challenging. It's good to know when to stop and try again later. Sometimes we've gone back a different day and immediately found a cache we'd searched high and low for the first time there. Be *okay* with not scoring. Just like with life, some days suck :)

Sorry for jumping into your show, Karen, but you've had far too many *special* adventures for me to sit back and watch you lead a pack of trusting newbies lol



BTW, someone asked us how long we had been going geocaching, we started in September 2004, so about 2.5 years now. I have been digging up old geocaching pics for the illustrations with those posts, it's amazing how much my kids have grown in only a few years.

More on Geocaching

After I wrote my Getting Started on Geocaching post, Mathmom commented:
Your post was very convincing about how much fun geocaching is, but I'm still not really sure how to get started. Do you just go to a website and pick a cache and find it? What kinds of things do you bring along to put in when you take something out? What do the littler kids do on an outing? What else do I need to know?



Ah, those are good questions, I now see how I mostly talked about acquiring a GPS, not much about the practical aspects of the hunt.

How do I know where the heck the caches are?

The easiest way to find out about local caches, is to go to the Geocaching website. In the upper right corner, you will see a 'Search for caches' 'By Zip code' option. Fill in the zip code of your town and see what comes up. It will show a list of caches starting at your zip code. There are more and more caches around nowadays. When we got started, there were only a handful of local caches.

How to read the 'Nearby geocaches' table?

• First column: direction and how far away;
  
  
• Type of cache. There are normal caches, multi caches, puzzle caches and more. Click here for descriptions of different types of caches. For the rest of this post, I'll just cover normal caches, you can read more about the other types on the geocaching website. This column also shows whether a cache has special things like travel bugs or geocoins in it.
  
  
• Cache rating. The first number is the hide, scale 1 to 5. 1 is easy hide, should not be too hard to find. 5 can be very very tricky hide. Second number is terrain. 1 is wheelchair accessible. 5 is 'needs special equipment, which might be a boat or rock climbing equipment or who knows what.
  
  Terrain 3 or 4 would be longer hike or more elevation changes. Usually the description of the cache will tell more about the type of terrain, but not always. So the terrain rating is additional help when you try to figure out which caches to do.
  This column also shows cache size, from micro (just a log, no trading items) to normal or even big.
  
  
• Other columns are things like cache name, date placed, date last found, and such.

How to read the cache page?

The cache page is mostly self explanatory, good things to notice are the links to maps, and the coordinates (somewhere at the top once you have registered). It also shows logs of people who have found the cache, which will give you more of an idea how hard it is and such.

Choose a cache and Go for it!

Look at the list of caches and find one you want to do. If it's a normal cache, bring some trading items, which can be any cheap plastic crap little things you find around the house or in your kids toy box. McDonalds toys often are popular and the most lame trading item is a golf ball. We usually let all the kids bring a trading item, so they all can trade if they want to.

Find the cache, trade, sign the log and go home to log the cache on the computer, so it will be counted as an 'official' find. About the littler kids, in our family they do exactly the same as the older kids. They help find the cache, and they fight about the trading items ^^. Oh, and bring a flash light :p

What is a travel bug???

Sometimes there are special items in a cache, either a travel bug or a geocoin. The travel bug will have a so called travel bug dog tag with a number on it, the geocoin has a number too. Those are not normal trading items, but items which are supposed to make it to another cache. So don't pick those up unless you are willing to put them in a different cache. We as a family have a bunch of travel bugs out there, some have made it to France, Germany, Australia, Spain, and other places.



Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. If not, grab your GPS and go find your first cache! Please leave me a comment if you do so :)

Love is ...

Making a birthday card for your big brother



Jane's cards are always very elaborate. She spent quite some time making this one for Cees's birthday (yes, I know it's way past his birthday, just had never shared the card with you guys yet :p)



My kids really enjoy making cards for siblings and friends, and I have to say that they have way more character than store bought ones.

Happy Love Thursday!

Enjoyable Day

Today we had homeschool group in the church, where I got quite some go studying done, was having quality time with my kids. Actually, the only ones with me were Kate and Sylvia, the others found better things to do than hanging out with their mom.

I was supposed to go geocaching, but that didn't work out. I remembered just in time that that meant I could go to aikido instead!

We did free style practice, where you got attacked by three people and you had to figure out ways to deal with the attack. Hard, but fun. If anything, it showed me how much I still suck at this ^^

Decided to find a local micro after aikido, the only thing was that I didn't bring my GPS. I had quite a good idea where the micro was hidden though, and some careful searching did reveal it. The only problem was that it was a very public location, and it's hard to be inconspicious when digging around in a guard rail in the middle of the night ^^

Only five kids at home, weird to have so little. Two girls are spending the night at a friends house.

Kate was sleep walking again. It has happened two or three times over the last few months. I used to sleepwalk as a kid, so it's not a new thing to me. Just interesting, and makes me ponder what would cause it.

Quote of the Day

Cees 'Mom? Can our xbox go online?'
Me 'No'
Cees 'But would it be technically possible?'
Me 'Yes, it is.'
Cees 'How would I do that?'
Me 'You can sucker papa into getting internet connection in the basement.'
Cees 'So it would be ok with you if I did it?'
Me 'Sure, fine with me.'
Cees, excitedly 'AWESOME!!!! Then I can get on Xbox live! And I can kill people I have never met!!! And when they whine about it, I can tell them 'LEARN2PLAY NOOB!!!'



The joys of teenagers!

The Joys of Baking

Or better, the joys of OTHER people baking.

Today, Tim made a big batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Tara made chocolate chip waffles.
Sense a theme here?

Nice to be able to feed my kids healthy chocolate without actually having to DO anything for it :)

How to get Started in Geocaching

Since The Rainbow Connection was asking about it, I figured I would write a post about how to get started on geocaching.



We ourselves started a few years ago. A friend had been telling me it would be a great activity for our family, and after a few gentle nudges, I finally went out and got ourselves a GPS.



Figuring out which GPS to get was not an easy task. I went to the geocaching web site and to their forums, and read tons of the messages on there, and mostly got more confused. Eventually I just closed my eyes and ordered something on amazon that looked ok and didn't get bad reviews on the forums.




I just looked and this might be a good thread for ideas for a cheap GPS.



When I bought my Garmin Etrex GPS, it still was around $164. It felt like a HUGE amount of money and I have to admit that I did have second thoughts and wondered whether it would be worth it. A few weeks later, there was no doubt in my mind at all that this was worth it. It was a lot of fun to go out and find caches as a family.



Looking back a few years later, I have gotten such an immense amount of enjoyment out of my GPS. The prices have really come down now though, so where I spent more than $150, a good GPS can be had for a lot less now.



I can recommend it for anyone who likes to spend time outdoors, it is a wonderful way to discover new places and interesting location right in your backyard and farther away. When you go out caching, make sure to put flash lights in your supplies though, to prevent things like this from happening. Things did got a lot smoother when we got into the habit of always bringing flash lights. Of course, us being us, even with flash lights, we still got ourselves into prickly situations like Oliver's Cave.



Geocaching has gotten it to the tops of mountains and into the darkest woods. It has gotten us digging through plant containers in shopping malls, helped us discover cool monuments and has been a very enjoyable family activity. If you have been wondering whether you should get into it, the answer is yes ^^



Let me know if this post helps you or if you have more questions. And let me know if you decided to take the plunge and buy a GPS!





Those last few pictures are from the top of Mt Kearsarge, where we were FTF on a new cache. Stunning views!