Jun

28

Geo-Cache Hunting

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First I had to share real quick… we don’t always encourage the kids to play with food, but once in awhile — we have fun with it. LOL. Here’s Bailey’s dinner plate tonight.. pancakes, bacon, eggs, potatoes, and apple slices… they ended up being like teddy bears but the heads were made with mickey mouse pancake shapers…. the eggs are supposed to make a sunshine LOL.


David recently discovered Geo Caching… You can read more about it by clicking the link but to quickly describe it, it’s a fun game you use with the features of a GPS unit. The Geo Cache website has coordinates of cache treasures all over the world… you can type in your zip code to narrow down your search and pick from ones that you can walk to, drive to, hike to, etc.

You type in the coordinates of the Geo Cache into your GPS unit and off you go on your hunt. Today, we wrote down a few to check out and had a hard time finding the first two, which were at a rest area. The next one was even tougher to find, but there are clues on the website to go along with the coordinates… so we’ll go back and try to find them later. The last one we did find… it was sitting behind a statue of horses in a business plaza about 2 miles away. It was a tub of little treasures, small toys like plastic soldiers, poker chips, keychains, etc. The idea is you take something out of the tub and replace it with something else. We took a traveling bug, which resembled a miniature cootie (remember this game?) bug. It had a tag attached to it with an id number you type online… our bug has been in California and Hawaii. We are going to hide it in a cache when we are camping next week, so it will have at least traveled a little ways :)

Here are a couple of pictures I snapped with my cell phone, I didn’t have my camera with me today. Ashlyn was the official “logger”, she signed the log. Tanner was the official “navigator”. McKenzie and Bailey were the ones that were to open the cache and pick an item, but David was so excited about it, he handled that this time. LOL. Next time we may do one that might require a little hiking, a little more hunting, etc. This one we parked the car and walked 40 feet and there it was. LOL. It’s fun though… the kids all enjoyed it. The girls all said it was their “high” today during high/low at dinner time. :)


Jun

27

Cooking With Kenzie Rae

Filed Under Kidlets, mckenzie, my kitchen | Leave a Comment

Still nothing too exciting to report on day two of Summer vacation. The kids are just enjoying unstructured playtime. I’ve given them free reign of video games, going to the park, heeleys outside, remote control cars, tv time, Webkinz, etc. Just a break from routine, from schedules, from time limits and restrictions. They ARE still doing all of their regular chores and keeping their rooms clean, and the corner has seen a couple of noses for arguing, so no — my kids are not fully running my roost ;) I don’t plan on them sitting in front of the TV or the playstation all summer though, we’ll be getting back into a good summer schedule probably by the weekend. :)

McKenzie decided to make lunch for everyone today. We had Mac N Cheese w/hot dogs and Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches. I didn’t think she’d be able to prepare 5 sandwiches, but she did and a great job it was! It was so darn cute, I thought I’d better photo-document it.




Jun

26

Bindi The Jungle Girl

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It’s the first day of Summer Vacation and what are we doing? Not a darn thing really. We have several boxes/tubs to unpack still, so maybe we’ll work on that and some garden stuff in the backyard.

Oh and one cool thing I have to talk about today…. We’ve recently been introduced to the life of Cable TV since moving here. Along with that came… ON DEMAND. :) It’s the coolest thing and has helped settle my kids down several times the past couple of weeks (right now Tanner and Bailey are watching Prince of Egypt on it, it’s the quietest they’ve been in days LOL). Anyway, we were flipping through some different things last night and came across a preview of Bindi The Jungle Girl.

Is she not the most adorable little girl ever?

I just set up a season pass for it on my DVR, my kids will love it. It’s definitely a family gathering type of show. She is spunky and delivers all of the information she is giving so well and makes you want to keep watching! She is just full of passion, the most I’ve ever seen from a little girl her age — you almost forget she’s only 8! The preview shows footage Steve Irwin shot just before he died. He’ll appear in 26 episodes according to an article I read. She will educate us about all types of different animals, reptiles, etc and about the conservation of the wildlife and their habitat. Her mom appears on her show in a segment called “Crikey” and for the younger kids, there is a Wiggles like group on her show called “The Crocmen” who sing and dance.

Where else can you see an 8 year old little girl traipsing around through Tazmania searching for wombats! I am really looking forward to watching this with my kiddos. They take questions via her blog site “Bindi’s Blog”… which I just spent quite a lot of time clicking around. There are some video entries of her growing up. Check it out! Bindi The Jungle Girl

~Jessica

Jun

25

School’s Out For Summer

Filed Under Kidlets, family fun, friends, summer, vacation | Leave a Comment

What a weekend! We stopped at Sportsmen’s Warehouse and started planning our upcoming camping trip, while we did a little shopping. We haven’t camped in years, we need pretty much all the equipment. :) David was stoked about the Mariner’s game, though he didn’t talk much about it when he finally got home… the M’s lost 1-16. Yikes, but he was really going to see Griffey, anyhow. ;) Gramma Lisa, the kids (minus Katie who stayed the weekend at Great Grandma’s) and I had a yummy dinner at The Cheesecake Factory Friday night. I don’t think I’d return with the kids. The restaurant was really nice, the booths were nice and big. However, they did not offer a children’s menu, crayons, anything of that nature and we had a hard time keeping the kids on their bottoms in the booth until the food arrived about 30 minutes after we were seated. They had excellent bread though and the chicken/gravy/mashed potato dinner we ordered was EXCELLENT. I ordered a slice of some type of candy bar cheesecake to go. It was scrumptious! I’d love to go back… sans kids.

The kids got to swim on Friday night for about an hour at Gramma Lisa’s pool. They had a great time :)

Our Saturday agenda included a trip to the Point Defiance Zoo, followed by the horse races at Emerald Downs (we are not big gamblers, we just went for fun and to show our horse loving girls the horses). Again, another nice day… the zoo is a lot smaller and features less animals than our Oregon Zoo but we enjoyed the Baby Beluga show and the kids play area is fantastic.
The horse races were alot of fun. The girls all adore horses, they ran to the fence every time one walked by or the races were going. We let them play along by picking horses for us to bet on for them. Tanner had luck on his side that day, he picked winner after winner after winner. He was having a good time with that. Bailey would pick a horse and yell “that’s my horse” and get so excited when her horse won, which actually happened a few times! Us… not so lucky. LOL. But it was a good time.

Sunday we drove up to a campsite called Beaver up on the Wind River on a whim. It had been raining all day, so we just jumped in the car, thinking we wouldn’t really be getting out and walking around, but it cleared up for awhile and we did. We weren’t quite prepared. It was a beautiful spot to take pictures :) We met The Houstons along the way, and they went to check it out with us. Beautiful area, but we won’t be camping there anytime soon - it wasn’t really what we were looking for :) We decided to go with a campground called Seaquest, our first time camping there… so that should be fun. It’s right by Mt St Helens and has lots of hiking trails. Let’s hope the volcano stays sleeping during our stay ;)

~Jessica

1/31/08 - I can’t get these pictures to upload properly, so please check them out at our old journal archive page: June 2007 or our photo gallery: June 2007. Thanks!

Jun

21

End Of The Year Festivities

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The kidlets had their last full day of school today in Battle Ground. They go through Monday, but they are half days, why they don’t stick those two half days together, make one full day and be off for break tomorrow makes no sense! We are winding up the year with field trips, field days, and that sort of thing. Tanner is in a Spelling Bee tomorrow, we’re going to go to that and head up to Seattle after that. David is going to a Mariners game and we are going to hang out with Gramma Lisa and go to The Cheesecake Factory and possibly Gameworks, then Saturday we are going on the ferry and to the zoo — or if it’s raining, we’ll find something else fun to do :)

My last update to the Photo Collage page was in October of last year. I have kept pictures uploaded to my photo sites, but I haven’t had a chance to download all of the images and all of that to my new notebook and I just don’t have the patience to sit on the desktop anymore :) Here is June’s photo album and below that a link to the photo albums page.

June 2007 Pics

~Jessica

Jun

16

Super Quick Update

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Since we last updated, we’ve MOVED! It’s been so busy with that and the end of the year activities for softball, school and all of that, I’ve barely had a moment to update. I have a ton of pictures from our festivities the past month, including McKenzie’s 7th Birthday. Katy also turned 15 and David turned 128 since our last update ;o)

I hope to have pictures ready to post and time to update more in the next few days so check. Meanwhile, Happy Father’s Day to all the daddies! Our plans, weather permitting, are to go to the park and have a picnic dinner with my dad and some of his girlfriend’s family. I asked David what he wanted me to make, his choice ended up being “Apple Crisp” and I’m making a smoked salmon salad to take with us as well. I’ll post the recipes tomorrow :) Fingers crossed for sunshine!

~Jessica

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