A crazy weekend and searching for treasure.

Whoops! Fun Fact Friday just sort of ran into next Wednesday before I could blink! Sorry about that folks.

My Mom and Dad were here this weekend to watch some baseball/teeball games (all rained out again-Ugh.). We were awakened at 4:30 in the morning to the sound of Mom asking us where the nearest hospital was. Uh-oh. ER visit. Sounds vaguely familiar, no?

Turns out Dad has kidney stones, and spent the whole weekend in the hospital. Definitely not the way he wanted to spend the weekend, however he did get to watch the race in peace. The decibel level emitted by my children rival any speeding car turning left. He is/will be fine, though, so all is well.

In other news, I finally tried something I have been dying to do for years. 3-4 Christmases ago, I bought my husband a handheld GPS. I thought it would be fun for him to use on fishing trips, and I really wanted to try geocaching. I thought his tech-geek and my nature-geek would mesh together and we’d have a ball finding treasure everywhere. Well, in theory, that sounded great. In practice, we never got around to it.

This weekend, we got around to it. Or rather, I declared that it was Mother’s Day and as the mother in residence, I got to decide what was on the schedule for the day. Since I couldn’t convince anyone to go on sunny Saturday, we all trudged out in raincoats and muck shoes on Sunday with a list of nearby caches in hand. I’m sure if any neighbors were looking out their windows, we provided them with untold amusement. Two adults, 3 children and a stroller, raincoats, giant ponchos and waterproof blanket (for the kid in the stroller), all walking down the street in the dripping rain toward the neighborhood park.

But we had success! We found our first cache without wandering in circles (too much!), and only a few minutes of searching once we found the right coordinates. This cache was a family-friendly one, and was packed with little kid toys. The accepted rule is to always trade evenly or trade up, so both kids chose their treasures (McD’s bunny and Matchbox Car) and their tradeables carefully. After carefully placing the box back where we found it, we jubilantly headed back out of the woods to try for another (which we also found!). By the time we found two, the thrill of being out in the rain started to be replaced by the day’s chill and sore kid legs, so we called it quits and went back home, guided by the GPS and my oldest’s eagerness to be the navigator.

So we’re hooked. At least the kids and I are hooked. I don’t think my husband is convinced I am quite sane yet. My determination to go in the rain may have made me appear just a little unsound. But we had a ball finding “treasure”. And the electric gadget we were looking at didn’t have any flashing lights or cartoon characters, or commercials. It led us outside as a family and I’m thrilled.

I’m also obsessed about wondering if there’s a nearby cache everywhere I go, but that’s a story for later.

Until next time…
c