Where the heck are the kids?

A really, really good thing about homeschooling: we don't follow the school schedule. So when our bathroom needed its' redo (going along smoothly, although slower than we wanted), we appealed to Grandma to have our darlings at her house for awhile. They will end up staying with her for nearly two weeks, with me going down to give the poor woman a break every few days.

I think they're doing more "on vacation" with Grandma than they do at home - and this was also true when we visited the Rocky Mountain grandparents last month. Maybe it's the change of location, or the idea of special time with the grandchildren, but it's certainly the stuff great memories are made of.

They're spending lots of time outside, playing badminton, golf, and hanging out reading the comics (Grandma gets a daily paper, hurray!). Owen has learned to use a scooter in the week he's been there, and now he can speed around, more-or-less safely - it's amazing to see!

They've also been to, in Luke's words, a "very cool book fair" at the local library, started a bird count, visited a farm and a played at a variety of playgrounds.

One homeschool-friendly activity is letterboxing, where you follow clues posted on the internet (see the link over in "Favorite Places on the Web") that lead to a little logbook, stamp, and inkpad hidden out in a wilderness somewhere near you. Luke jumped into letterboxing, back when he was still a Pokemon nut, by finding a series of letterboxes near us with some of his favorite Pokemon characters. My buddy Jen and I were psyched when she found a letterbox series near my Mom-in-law's for us to seek out. Some pictures:

Luke leads this expedition, the rest of us just do what we're told.

Found one!!

For this boy, writing is torture - but he insisted on "blogging" in (as he called it) at each letterbox. Motivation is everything!

In the woods, we found a teepee-style fort! How cool is that?

Painted turtles and a mallard duck that we saw while letterboxing.

Jen, don't look at this next one! It's the snake that scared the pants off us just after we found the third letterbox...

When I go pick the guys up next week, I think we're going to post clues to our own letterbox - a Star Wars series, of course. I get goosebumps just thinking about it - rarely have we found something that's educational, inexpensive, and so much fun to boot.