Letterboxing

We found our first letterbox this weekend! What is a letterbox and why did I go looking for one, you ask? Well, letterboxing started in southwestern England in 1854 when a man named James Perrott hid his calling card in a jar. He gave out clues and encouraged other people to leave their cards in the jar as well. Eventually others started hiding jars and leaving self addressed post in the jar hoping that they would be mailed by the next person to find it. This is where the term letterbox came from. Now, there are hundreds of thousands of letterboxes hidden all over the world, and thanks to the internet, it is easy to find the clues. All you have to do is make yourself a box, a custom stamp, and a note pad. Pictured here is my letterbox with my "ARC" logo and two smaller stamps for my daughters. Then find a clue for a letterbox near you and go hunting for it. The hidden boxes are waterproof containers and these days usually contain a log book and a rubber stamp. You can read the log book and then put your custom stamp into it. Then you take the letterboxes' stamp and put it in your note pad, to start your collection of letterboxes you found. Each letterbox will have a unique stamp in it. Pretty fun and the kids love it!

K'NEX

So there I am sitting on the floor hoping little people around playing zoo with my daughter. I thought, you know, I can't wait until she is old enough to play with legos. Then I decided that she is probably old enough. I took a trip over to the local toy store and went over to the lego section. I thought it would be fun to get a huge set with lots of pieces and build this massive thing. Well the biggest set they had was this airport thing with about 1500 pieces. What sucked though, was it didn't build one big thing; it built a bunch of little stuff. There was a plane, a couple cars, a couple building, etc. So I started looking around at other things. Then I saw K'NEX. There was amusement park rides that you could build, like a pirate ship, tubing, rollercoster, and more. Plus these things actually did stuff. Once you built the coaster you could turn it on and watch them go. I saw a tube ride called that had about 800 pieces and stood three feet tall! Turns out that both Natalie and I like building with it. Pretty cool. There website is under my links section.