The Zen Life: November 2008

Letterboxing

11/25/2008 04:22:00 PM by ZenMomma

One of the all-time coolest activities we have gotten into this year is Letterboxing. It is like a treasure hunt--complete with clues! The treasure is a box that contains a journal and a stamp.
Each letterboxer (or letterboxing team--our family is a team) has their own journal and stamp (ours is shown above).

We use a couple letterboxing websites to find the clues for letterboxes in our area (or in an area where we are visiting/vacationing), and then a-hunting we go!

Once we find the letterbox (not an easy feat), we stamp the letterbox stamp into our team journal along with a date and a note or two about the quest to find it.

We stamp our family stamp into the letterbox journal, and sign our names, date and where we are from.

These are just some of the Letterboxing Stamps we have found!

The boys just love going to find letterboxes around our city.

They love the National Treasure movies and there is a similarity to that!
They love trying to solve the clues and hunting for a hidden "treasure"! Heck--so do Mike and I!!!!

We found this "altered" stop sign while letterboxing in Syracuse. Mike turned the car around after we had passed it so that we could get a picture of it! Quite the "treasure" to find!!

After the 7th and final Harry Potter book came out, a handful of the stop signs in our neighborhood were "altered" to say "Stop Voldemort"! We LOVED those signs! (They have since been replaced and we miss them.)

The Unschooling Way!

11/23/2008 09:15:00 PM by ZenMomma

Okay--so it has been awhile! Admittedly, I have some catching up to do! My goal is to get it all caught up before November ends! Let's see how I do!!

In October, we took a LOVELY camping trip with some other Homeschooling families in the Syracuse area. We had such a great time!!!

I think the whole experience can be summed up by Ryan, who told Mike: "I REALLY Like playing with the other homeschooled kids. They don't pick on my like the kids in school do."

That was a bittersweet moment for us as a family. Ryan and Garrett's mom still refuses to trust in the boys, and honor their wishes to be homeschooled. The frustrations that they feel from their "teachers" and the other kids grow from being in a system that cannot (or will not) honor Who They Are. ::sigh::

We still continue to honor Them when they are with us. And listen to them and their frustrations. Our biggest hope now is that the damage that is done by being in school and by having a parent who doesn't listen to and trust in Who They Are can be mitigated by what we provide for them while they are with us.

So, back to the camping trip! The boys Love Love Love to camp! It was Mid-October when we went, and the boys found a Monarch!!! We were a little concerned that he was a bit to far North for the Migratory pattern. But as Unschoolers--we do not judge Any Being taking It's own time!

On this trip we also discovered Letterboxing! The Joy in Discovery was endless! (This is our stamp!)

The boys loved this personal kind of "treasure hunt". We have continued this since returning home (Blog on Letterboxing to come shortly!).

The first night there we had a pot-luck dinner. The boys had pork-fried rice made by a couple of teen girls in the group, meatball subs, pasta dishes, chili, chips--and of course SMORES!!!