A New Family Hobby

The monkey house has discovered a new hobby... geocaching!  For those of you not familiar with it, you go to the geocaching website to get gps coordinates for hidden boxes called geocaches.  Some are tiny micro caches that only contain a scroll to sign, others are large enough to contain "treasures!"  You sign the log and put it back where you found it for the next person to find.

Today, we found one micro and 2 larger containers at one of our favorite parks and let me tell you, the kids are HOOKED!!!  The gps coordinates get you close, then you have to use your detective skills to locate them from there.  Some are very cleverly hidden, like the micro one we found hidden behind a dummy bolt in a post.  Others are pretty obvious if you get close enough and know where to look.

One of the caches we found today had some treasures the kids traded for.  If you take something from a cache, you have to replace it with something else.  Logan found a set of brand new golf balls in one and Amanda found a small stuffed seahorse.  : )

By far the best part of our adventure is that we discovered a new way to enjoy one of our favorite parks and had a fabulous day out in nature.  ~Heaven ~

Water + Bike = Waterbike?

We had some heavy rains not too long ago and it left some standing water in our ditch.  Logan discovered a new trick he could do with his new (to him at least) bike.

You know my monkeys!  If it's not dirty, it's not worth doing! : )

 Amanda had just had her bath (and put on her pj's) so she sat this one out.  I told her if she wanted to take another bath she could play, but I guess the girl can only take so much clean soap in a day.  : )

 When Logan was done for the evening his backside looked a little dirty... Okay, A LOT dirty!
Guess who had HIS second bath for the day.

Eggs, Bunnies and a Beautiful Sunrise

Yesterday I had an epiphany. Just because I don't like Easter doesn't mean that I should deny my children the joy of waking Sunday morning to hunt hidden eggs. So off to the store I went for a frantic, last minute shopping trip (with about 10,000 other people). Back home, the kids knew exactly what was up when they saw all those eggs. We could hardly get them boiled before the kids dyed them.

Then we found this other dye kit (when we dug out our baskets) and we had to paint them again! By this point it was almost 10:00 at night and those of you that know me know that we NEVER stay up that late!!!!

Logan also remembered from two years back that the Easter Bunny hid little marshmallow bunnies all over the house so I had to put in an emergency call to Eric (out doing a fundraiser for LLS) to stop by Walgreen's and find us some bunnies! :-O

Now with my kids staying up WAY past their bed time (and me staying up even later finishing getting everything ready) you would think these crazy monkeys would sleep in, RIGHT? I did too, until I heard the pitter patter STOMP STOMP of not so little feet at 6 AM!!!!!

They were shouting "FOUND ONE!" "FOUND ONE!" at the top of their lungs when ever they spotted a pink or yellow cutie.

Oh, and the Easter Bunny must have thought they were really good finders now that they are older because he hid them GOOD!

Now keep in mind that it's still dark here, so my resourceful monkeys got out their flashlights so they could head outside to look for some eggs.

It adds another layer of challenge when you hunt by flashlight!

But find them they did.

Notice in the photo above that they were in short sleeves! It was quite cold this morning so they wisely headed back inside to put on more appropriate clothing before continuing the hunt.

We watched the sun come up while we hunted and more and more eggs were reveled in the light of day.

In all it took us 2 hours to hunt 24 bunnies, 50 plastic eggs, and 22 real eggs.

And wouldn't you know it. Here in the great state of Kansas where the wind comes ROARING down the plains there isn't even a small breeze to fly the new kites we got in our baskets!

Oh, well. Logan says it's a good day for blasting off rockets so we'll have to wake up their dad and see about that soon. Maybe I'll take a nap while they do that. With only 5 hours of sleep this momma is TIRED!!!

Spring Break - OKC

Belated, but here! Spring Break photos of our trip to Oklahoma City.

Day one we went to the zoo. Amanda could have spent all day in the petting zoo!

And we almost spent the whole time in the lorikeet feeding area!

When we finally left the lorikeets we went to the reptile house where they were feeding a lot of the animals. We stay for quite a while watching this snake swallow a rat.

And that's about all the time we had for the zoo! We'll have to go back again some day to see the rest, I guess!

Day two we went to the children's museum. We'll have to go back to that too because we spent 4 hours there and still didn't see it all. Three of us drove the segways.

Tried out the bed of nails!

Made a one-of-a-kind art piece for our walls.

And played with some sand wheels!

We only had 2 days in OKC before we headed to Branson. The weather wasn't the greatest so we ended up waiting for a huge storm system to pass before leaving town so we had to cram as much fun as possible into a few days!