Busy Busy Weekend

Well, I haven't logged in much the last few days because I have been very very busy. Friday afternoon Dwayne called to let me know that his compensation check finally came in. So I convinced him to take a few hours off early and run around to go shopping with me and the kids. It was fun to shop for the most part but Evie is at a stage where she is not behaving very well lately. She is our stubborn girl and gets extremely upset when she can't have things her way. Which of course is just about all the time because of her age. So despite all the screaming and fussing we were able to get some new clothes for all of us at Kohls and price a small plastic shed at Home Depot. We also decided to go ahead and purchase a small refurbished lawnmower for about $100. I'm extremely happy with the $20 lawnmower we bought on Craigslist but decided that since we could afford something a little nicer we would go ahead and get it. So now I'm going to post the lawnmower on Craigslist for $40 and see if we can make a few bucks off of it. After all, it does run, it just looks bad. LOL.

Saturday we woke up and did a mad dash through the house cleaning things up as Dwayne's parents were coming up to visit. Dianne and Terry came up with all the expected gifts, we made spaghetti for lunch, and had a really nice visit overall. They left around 2:30 in the afternoon.

Dwayne was expected to work in the nursery at church that night so I convinced him to take the kids and let me go off shopping on my own. I've been eyeballing the new Nintendo Wii for a while now and decided to go to GameCrazy. I spent way too much money and bought a used Wii with extra controllers and the new Wii Fit. I'm hoping that since the exercises are done in a game format I will get up and move more. Let me tell you those mini-games on Wii Fit are tough!

Sunday, we went to the butchers and stocked up on some more meat and then I had Dwayne go to Home Depot to get the shed. I stayed home with the kids as I didn't think Evie would behave well. He came home and we put together the shed. It was a Rubbermaid thing and it went together really really easy. What is great about it is that it will pull apart again really well also so if and when we have to move we will be able to take it with us. The new lawnmower's handle folds down and it just fits in the shed. We couldn't have had it work out better if we tried. I'm grateful that it works so well. After cleaning up all the mess we still had the rest of the afternoon off so I suggested that we try to find a geocache (more on that in a second) and then go scrounge our last little bit of money for a couple games for the Wii. After unsuccessfully finding the cache we went back to GameCrazy, bought MarioCart and SuperMarioGalaxy, and finished with a nice dinner at DairyQueen. We had dinner early enough that I let the kids have some ice cream. It was pretty neat to see their faces. Evie didn't want anything to do with it unless she could feed herself and then thought it was pretty neat. I let Sam have his first official ice cream cone. (I'm not a big one for messes, so I wanted to make sure he would be coordinated enough to eat it.) He thought it was great fun. He let mom help clean up his drips (by licking em up of course....tee hee,) but really thought the "cookie" was the best part. Evie was pretty good most of the afternoon too and didn't throw half as many fits as she has been doing lately. And now, the compensation check is completely gone but it was fun while it lasted.

Now about geocaching. I read about this new trend recently called geocaching that sounded very interesting to me. It was an inexpensive way for families to get out and about on a "treasure" hunt and discover new hidden places. Using a handheld GPS unit, you punch in some coordinates for a hidden cache and try to find it. Once you find it, you write your name on the paper found there and can see who else has found the cache before you. Some caches have a little trinket in them that you can take but you are expected to leave something for the next person with the same or greater value. What is great is that when you do some research you discover that there are caches hidden all over the world! It has really turned into this global treasure hunt. They are super easy to super difficult depending on how hard you want to work to find one. The are stashed all over towns, countrysides, or even at the end of a long hike if you really want an adventure. This sounded like so much fun to me. When I was little, I loved hiking, and thought treasure hunts were great fun. I also thought that this would be a great family tradition to start. It is an inexpensive way for us to get out of the house and enjoy each other as a family. So I used some of our bonus money and bought a small GPS unit at Target. It cost about $150 and the reviews I read on this unit were that it was a great unit to start out with and good for beginners. You can, of course, spend a lot more for one that has better detailed maps, colors, and all kinds of extras. But I decided to start the simple route to see if this is even something we would do. http://www.geocaching.com is the place to find information all about this new sport and once you make an account you can easily have access to the thousands of coordinates of hidden caches, log your finds, and even post your pictures.

It turns out there was a cache just down the road from us so we set out to find it. We found where it was supposed to be but didn't have any luck finding the cache itself. We forgot to pack a flashlight because we think it is hidden in one of the dark crevices under the bridge. It could also have been hidden somewhere more deeply in the rocks but Dwayne and I didn't have time to really search as the kids thought the icky dirty runoff creek was fun to play in. Now that we know where it is supposed to be though we will be back with the right tools and hopefully have a better solution to our first attempt at a find. We are hoping to do this almost every weekend especially while the weather is nice. Even if we go down to Oregon, we will bring our "cache bag" with us because literally you can geocache anywhere. There are hundreds of coordinates all over the place. I'll keep you posted on how well we are doing on our treasure hunts.