I am always looking for things to do to get our boys OUTSIDE.
I stumbled across this website for Letterboxing quite by accident. And was immediately intrigued. And then I got excited.
Here's the back story, if you're interested.
Letterboxing, bascially, is a like a treasure hunt type game. Small boxes are hidden in various locations—usually outdoors, though many are planted indoors as well—and the creator of the box will release clues so others can go out and find them later. The box is expected to have a logbook that finders can log into and a unique stamp, usually hand-carved, that the finder can stamp into their own personal logbook as a record of all the letterboxes they've found. Most letterboxers have a unique stamp to represent themselves, called a signature stamp, that they stamp into the logbooks found inside letterboxes so others who find the letterbox later know they found it.
Make sense?
The first thing I did was to tell Caleb and Phoenix the whole concept and they loved it. So, we went to the bookstore to find the, and here I quote Phoenix,
"The most perfectly perfect logbook goodness that exists in the world."
We all decided on this one:
Then we had to come up with our "team" name, something appropriately cool enough and then come up with an image to go along with it. Caleb and I came up with the name, "The Bedhead Spies" and Zack came up with the stamp image. I bought a make your own rubber stamp kit and Zack created this:
We then decorated the inside cover of our Perfectly Perfect Logbook:
So, our total Letterboxing supplies consist of a homemade rubber stamp, an ink pad, a compass, a pen and our logbook. Using the letterboxing website I located a series of letterboxes that were hidden in the Decatur Cemetary not far from our house. On Saturday Zack and I took the boys, even Joshua, and starting from the main entrance gate, proceeded to follow the clues given to find the letterboxes.
IT WAS SO MUCH FUN.
Even Zack and I were getting into it, a lot, actually. The boys would run ahead, yelling and freaking out and having a blast and Zack and I would look at each other and just start giggling hysterically.
"This is AWESOME."
Here are some pictures from Saturday:
You can see in the first picture one of the stamps from another "team" that had last found that particular box before us.
We went out again on Sunday (yesterday) to find a few more and, once again, it was great. We're looking forward to finding some all over the country. I've told the boys that when Zack and I are in San Francisco this weekend that I'll do my best to find one while I'm there.
Speaking of boys, we have some serious hamster cage cleaning that needs to take place. Walking into their rooms is something akin to walking into a cesspool when it comes to the...pungent smells their hamsters create.
;-)