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.