Hide and Seek

I thought this would be a great game to play with the boys.
However as you all know the boys are now 8 & 10 years old so even though they play this game well I thought they might like it if I upp'd the anti a little?
Maybe in the form of us trying to seek something that was already hidden?
Of course in this day and age of technology then there has to be some techno part to it and so that is why I decided it was time for us to get into Geocaching.

What is that I hear you cry....?
It is in simple terms a game of hide and seek that you use a GPS to find an item hidden by someone else in the town/country/world using coordinates.
There is a whole website dedicated to Geocaching and once you get started it is addictive!!

You can download an app onto your mobile phone and Bob's your uncle you are off!
You look at the map of where you are, locate a cache (item) to find and using the coordinates go off and try to find it.
It is usually a canister of some description that can range in size from a small pill box up to a 10 litre bucket!

However the whole purpose is to do it as discretely as possible so no one knows what you are doing as the cache needs to be found and then left as discovered ready for the next person to find.
You do however log on the paper inside the canister that you were there and also log it on the website so you can keep track of ones you have discovered already.

When you first look at the map on the website, it is enough to make you fall off your seat, there are hidden caches everywhere and I literally mean everywhere, all over the world to be more precise!
There are 12 that I can find that are within 2 miles walking distance of our house!
Stuck in a bush, up a tree, under a board walk even magnitised to a chair in a public place.

But it is just a fence?

Wrong! There's a geocache

The boys have already been checking out if there are any near Grandma's House, near the beach where we spend a lot of our summer time and near their school, although I have told them that they can not search for them without me as they need the coordinates and the GPS on my phone to assist them, however give it a few years and I can probably send them off for the afternoon with a phone and a list and they would happily entertain themselves around the city!

Hiding

Seems my 2 love to hide. Alex is very good at it too, although a little dangerous at times because he will go and hide and is so good he won't say anything, even if you call his name, he stayes dead quiet and won't answer. Great when you are playing at home, but could be a worry if he ever ran off in a shop to hide!

Alex found a cupboard to hide in today, Ben did exactly the same when he was this age.

Shame it is the cupboard on our tv unit!

Suitcase

As we are flying to Wellington this weekend we realised that we really needed a new suitcase. We brought a new one not long after Alex was born, which the boys share, but Steve and I don't really have anything suitable for the 2 of us to share.

So we looked around and found something suitable.

Children being children decided that this was an ultimate hiding place.

So our 2 had great fun hiding, amazing how many kids you can fit in a suitcase!

Birthday Party

So we invited a few little friends over and had a little party to celebrate Ben's 4th Birthday.
We did nothing too special, just as it happens to turn out, the same as last year, a little trip on a model train.
Everyone really enjoyed it, weather turned out great and then it was back home for a little party tea and cake.

The kids all got on so well and were racing all around the house.
They all particularly enjoyed playing hide n seek. So it was really cute to capture Ben and Alex both taking a turn at seeking.
They both took it so seriously and stood with their hands over their faces whilst counting to 10.