Wrapping Up with My Den

Even though graduation was on May 12th, my den is having our end of year picnic on June 14th, just due to schedules.  As Bears, we worked really hard on the Scout Law.  This end of year picnic is a celebration of each of the boys recognizing how they lived by the law during their meetings.  At the end of each meeting, I asked the boys to say which point of the law another scout lived during the meeting.  Having the boys observe each other, learn what each point really means, and verbalize how someone else lived a point of the law, was such a good practice.  I had to help at times, and I would ask if they agreed with my observation.  They didn't always agree with me of the person who noticed something about them.   This started after a particularly painful visit to the police station, a required field trip.  It was a very long visit, and the boys lost it.  They lost it before it was overly long, though.

As a way of reining them back in and getting them to focus on their behavior, I promised them a party after they had lived all the points of the law during meetings.  Reverent I allowed for outside the meeting, I counted church or other ways of living their faith or acting out their faith.   That was way back in October, and it took us until our final meeting in May to make it all happen.  But I'm so proud of the boys for looking for the good in their fellow scouts.  I happen to have a scout who doesn't go with the flow easily and is very tempermental.  When we started this program, the other boys were having a hard time finding something positive about him, how he lived the law.  By the end, things were coming far more easily to the boys.

The picture shows the neckerchief slides I made and am going to give to them at our picnic.  I'm so excited by how they turned out.  I love to see my Scouts wearing the neckerchief slides I make for them!  

Packing It Up

Moving boxes are expensive.  Truly, expensive.  Back in September Bill and I talked about it and agreed we would have to sell the house.  It was at that point that I began the task of downsizing and packing things away.  My favorite store (at this point in my life) is Costco.  Before we moved from VA, I searched online for Costcos and did my house search around that.  And now, all these many years later, it has been so beneficial.  While I've been using their boxes for years as a way to distribute popcorn at Boy Scout selling time, this time around I needed boxes that had lids.  Most of the boxes there have their lids cut off or never had any lids to begin with.  BUT, the food court and the bakery keep their lids.  Ice cream boxes, churro boxes, pizza ingredient boxes...all are awesome.  They work so well for books and other heavy stuff, because they're kinda small.  For bigger boxes, you have to head to the bakery.  They break theirs down, so you have to tape them back up, but they're also fantastic.

We have so many of these lining shelves in my parents' basement.  I have 25 boxes of homeschooling materials alone.  Now, not all of those are in these boxes, but a great many are.

I am so grateful that our friends at Costco told us to check with the bakery.  They don't bring their boxes up front like all the other boxes, so we had never seen then.  As we were clearly gathering boxes for a move, one of the ladies at the exit gave us that tip.  Bill promptly checked with them.  We had to coordinate a time to pick them up, because they break them down and then put them out to recycle, so we had to come back when they were breaking down so we didn't interrupt their flow.   I am so very thankful that Costco allows us to take boxes.  We have a large liquor store across the street from us that has posted signs saying they no longer hand out boxes for moving.  What a shame.  On the spectrum of reduce/reuse/recycle, reuse is better than recycling.  I can use what's already made, I don't need more energy to convert it to something else, there's no waste...  So thank you, Costco, for being such a wonderful company!!!  

Time Flies By

We're now down to less than a month in the house.  At times it feels like so much still needs to be done, at other times I feel like we've got this made in the shade.  Local schools let out May 26th for the summer.  We've been finished since mid-February, except for their charter school they go to once a week, that ended on May 9th.

With the end of public school comes the start of our homeschool time.  Back in February, it felt like I had forever to plan and come up with a structure.  Now June is almost upon me. Fortunately, I have the tables of what they need to learn by subject.  But as I've mentioned before, I'm not so sure that's the schedule we're going to maintain on our year of travel.  Personal finance is a big one this year, we'll make sure we continue math, and we'll definitely learn about our country.  We'll work on our scout achievements, so we'll get a lot of life skills in on this trip.  Philosophy, big ideas....I want to get my kids thinking about bigger ideas than the surface level ideas they toss about.  Hand in hand with that, I'd love to have them paying attention to what's going on around them, see beyond themselves, make connections and pitch in without being asked.

I now have five days to get my act together.  Most of the month of June is going to be spent working on our research skills, but with books and on the internet.  The kids are already pretty good with this, but the purpose of this goes beyond just making sure that their research skills are up to snuff.  We actually need to get this trip planned out.  I have ideas, but I need the kids to be invested in this trip as well, so their ideas need to be heard.  This will also hit their informational oral presentations requirements.  Ah, and one on one math time with Mom.  Who doesn't love that?

Oh, and in and amongst all of this school stuff, I still have to finish packing and cleaning.  Let's hope it all goes smoothly!

Lone Scout

One of the difficulties of this travel year is continuing the scouting program.  We're progressing as Lone Scouts.  We headed down to the Denver Area Council today.  Bill spoke with staff, I hit the store.  My boys have grown, so several shirts were needed, along with all NB's Webelos stuff and J's Wolf stuff.  G and NS have both earned their one rank since the new program was instated, so they both needed new books, and then NB and J just need their new year's books.  Oh, and all the belt loops and Webelos pins.  It was not a cheap visit! While I was off collecting all the stuff, Bill was off collecting paperwork and trying to get all angles taken care of with the staff.  Bill's been Cubmaster of our pack for 5.5 of the past 7 years, so part of his work today was making sure pack stuff got settled.  The other part was getting our Lone Scout applications and talking about what it's going to take for us to actually do this.  We came home with Lone Scout applications, Merit Badge Counselor applications, and a ton of info. I've also got Leader's books for Wolves and Webelos that I borrowed from last year's leaders.  I'll have to return them to the pack, but I get to get a feel for the adventures before handing them back.  We've actually started working on things, going over information and practicing skills.  I told my den that I would send them videos of our progress for this year, so they can see what we're doing and try some of that stuff themselves.  I actually picked up six elective pins for NB, so we'll get to show the den some cool things we're working on this year that they may not actually have thought about working on.  

Along with getting the new is finishing up the old.  Since NB earned his Bear, I went ahead and attached it to his uniform, but at the same time stripped it of everything that can go on his Webelos uniform.  I'll clean this bad boy and then promptly pack it away, another memory to store.

Prepping the Van

Before we bought the van, we spent lots of time looking at DIY mods of the van, nice little upfits.  Oh, the amazing things people have done with their Sprinters.  We have dreams of what we could do to the Sprinter, but I think we're keeping it pretty small on this round.  Instead of custom chairs and pull out or up desk tops, we'll stick with modding the back to hold all our dressers and keep us organized.

We're going with the Sterilite three drawer dressers.  I have had one for years and years, purchased when I was teaching Sunday school and needed transportable storage.  The wheels came in handy back then, but for now, I want everything to NOT move, so we removed all my wheels and then never put the wheels on any of the other ones.  Fitting seven of these bad boys means stacking some, so Bill's building shelves for the back.  The awesome part of that is that we'll have room for the coolers under the dressers on the side.  Yeah!  Our old coolers had served us well, but required additional weight on top to keep closed, so we bought new ones since we'll be relying on them for many months.  We went with Coleman marine coolers.  Five days of ice.  We'll be testing that out.

We also invested in a Thule bike rack.  REI was having their anniversary sale, so we hit them up for shoes and a bike rack.  We've been looking at them for a couple months now, so it's a relief to have it checked off our list.  In my searching for places to go and things to do, I found Hiawatha Trail up in ID.  It looks really awesome, and the boys have some longer bike trips for their bicycling merit badge, so it's a perfect match.  We had only planned on taking three bikes, but Bill will need to go with the boys on Hiawatha, so we'll also end up taking a bike for  Bill.  Good thing we bought the four bike rack!  Talking to my parents about needing another bike, it turns out my dad is done with his bike, so we'll be taking his! The other mod we'll be taking on in the next week or so is installing a DVD player.  We won't be putting in screens, though--the van doesn't have a CD player.  It's got bluetooth, USB, auxillary, but no CD.  We could have gone with a portable disc player, but I worried about skipping and such.  I wanted something installed and stable, so this is the solution Bill found.  I'm very excited to get it installed finally.  So many people advocated us transferring our CDs to a USB drive, but I have a ton.  And I don't want to spend my time transferring formats.  Not to mention my technology woes, which would cause me much more frustration than I have room for in my life right now.  Now we'll be able to get back to listening to Story of the World. That's what we have planned for right now.  One of our goals at this point is to sell the tiny trailer before the big trip.  We'd like to fit everything into the van, safely and securely.  We should have the room, if we're smart about it all.  I'll let you know how it goes!

Organizing the Trip

The house is under contract!!!!  We now have a start date of sorts.  We'll be in town until the older boys return from South Dakota on their scout camp.  Knowing we won't be leaving the area until early July gives a sense of security, but also a bit of panic since I put all trip organization and planning on hold while the house was being prepped and on the market.  With the house on the market I was able to start planning again, since that involves little chaos.  Organizing for me, though, involves a TON of chaos.  

This is all our stuff, weighed and recorded.  Ok, it's really only our tent stuff, minus any personal items.  Nine sleeping bags (the older boys each have two), five pads, seven pillows, and a whole bunch of goodies.  I feel like we're missing some stuff from this, but I can't figure out what it would be.  I'll figure it out at some point, I'm sure.   It's amazing how little this looks like.  All but the coolers will fit in our small, 4x4, trailer that we'll sell once we've got our travel trailer.  But this stuff has seen us through quite a few trips.  The coolers are new, because our locks on our old coolers had broken, and we had to stack things on top of them just to keep them closed.  Not so handy.  We've been really happy with our setup to date, so we'll see how we feel after months, not weeks, of camping!      

 

   

This here's our baby trailer.  She's served us well, though she gets a lot of laughs.  Amazingly, we keep very organized and can fit an absolute ton of camp gear in there.  We did need to add the car top carrier, but the two of them combined are a traveling wonder.    

This is our school gear, unfiltered.  I put something like 25 boxes in storage at my parents' house, and whittled our keep pile down to this.  200+ pounds of stuff.  Um....it can't all go. I invested in Life of Fred Pre-Algebra because NS said he loved LoF; that's so five minutes ago.  *grinding teeth* Ok, well, that's fine, I also picked up Prentice Hall's stuff.  On the cheap, thank you used books.  Now I get to spend another couple of days (or weeks, who's to say?) sorting through this stuff and figuring out what we need between now and September.  If I don't need it until after mid-September, I'm good with storing it in plastic tubs at my parents' house, since we'll be back in the area.  There are other things that probably should have been packed away, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.  As I was breaking my back pulling all the heaviest boxes off the top shelf in the garage (?!?!), I realized how stupid putting books into bigger tubs was/is.  That's ok, I'm sure I need the two kids' dictionaries and the two kids' thesauri, and the dictionary of idioms and such.  Holy cow, this is a trip, not a new home we're filling up!  Man, I need to prioritize.  I can't believe (yeah, I actually can) I was thinking packing so many reference materials was a good idea.  Clearly I am an English major and can't let go of my texts, but that ain't gonna work on this trip!  Oh, do I have my work cut out for me!

Weather

In the Denver area, it's been raining.  A long time now, it seems.  My garden is totally digging it, but it makes me wonder about this trip.  Our first five or so months of this journey are in a tent.  We've had a lot of adventures in our tent, seen some grand sites, enjoyed our fair share of awesome weather.  But we've also camped out in bad weather.  We've had wind storms that threaten to take our tent, wind storms that took our tent when we weren't holding it down from inside, hail storms, rain storms, below freezing, and boiling hot.  I have to admit to hating being outside in rain.

I love our tent.  It's done such an amazing job over the last four years and 16 or so campgrounds.  The older boys' troop loves it because it's huge and fast to set up (compared to their gigantic troop tent).  I know it will all be fine once we're out doing it, but I'm sitting at home watching the dreary drizzle come down, and it concerns me for what lies ahead.  I need to read more of those stories of the women who crossed the country, gave birth, tore up their wagons and rode the rapids with a boat built from the wood.  Those women would scorn me.  Time to toughen up!