Letterboxing

Jilly-Bean!

We found treasure!

We went to visit our friends this past weekend and picked up a new hobby that is fun for the whole family - letterboxing! Basically there are letterboxes hidden all over the place, and you can find clues to find letterboxes in your own area by visiting atlasquest.com or letterboxing.org and typing in the name of your city/town. The clues read somewhat like a treasure map, and when you find the letterbox that you are looking for, it will usually contain a rubber stamp, an inkpad and a log book. You bring your own rubber stamps, leave a stamp in the notebook in the letterbox with your stamp, make a stamp in your own logbook using the rubber stamp in the letterbox you have just found to prove that you found it, and then put everything back where you found it so someone else can find it later. To Amelia and her buddy Liam, it was like a hunt for buried treasure, and I think they both really enjoyed it. I think it is also fair to say that my friend Jenn and I are also hooked on this new hobby. I can just imagine how much I would have loved it as a kid.

The rest of the weekend was great as well. Our friends Jenn and Mike adopted their daughter Jillian (aka Jilly-Bean) from Korea in January, and Brian and Amelia finally got a chance to meet her this weekend. Amelia is completely in love with her, sings songs about her, and now is a little mad that her friends Liam and Carly both have their little sisters home and she has to wait. For me, Jillian reminds me that this long wait will be completely worth it in the end!

Happy Easter!

Today Amelia and I went to the zoo for their Easter Egg Hunt and then for Lunch with the Easter Bunny. We had gone to Breakfast with the Bunny at the Zoo many times, but this was the first time that we went for an Easter Egg Hunt. Well, we never got the instruction sheet with the rules on it, and Amelia quickly filled her basket with eggs. As I looked around, I noticed that no other kids had nearly as many eggs as she did, so I started to tell her that I thought maybe we should put some of the eggs back. Then I started to see parents reading from a white sheet of paper, and I started to get suspicious. We went back inside, and I managed to find one of the white sheets of paper that had been left on a table. It turns out that we were only supposed to gather six eggs. Can you see the number of eggs Amelia had in her basket? There must have been thirty! Luckily, Amelia is really good about following rules that are written down, so when I read her the rule sheet, she happily went back outside and put her eggs back, counted out six, and went back inside to trade in her eggs for candy. I can just imagine what other parents were thinking when they saw me letting her go crazy with gathering the eggs! I have no idea how we completely missed the rule sheets, but we will know better for next time.
It was so cold here today (predicted to be colder on Easter this year than it was on Christmas!)so we didn't stay outside for very long, but we had a great time looking at the animals that live inside at the zoo. Brian met us at the zoo for lunch, and Amelia was so excited to see the Easter Bunny and have her face painted. This is definitely one of our favorite family traditions!

Secret Buddy

I have a secret buddy! My large Yahoo DTC group is doing a secret buddy swap where you can sign up and be assigned another waiting family, and each month or every other month, depending on your preference, you send a gift to that family. I can't say too much since we are supposed to keep our identity secret from our buddy until referral time (unfortunately quite a ways off right now!), but I am really excited to shop and send out the first package!