Odessa Park, Maryland

We went to Ikea to look at some furniture and wound up finding some geocaches. Two caches are stashed in the parking lot. The kids had fun exploring for them. We parents weren't too worried since the caches are in the back parking lot, far from the customers' eyes. We checked for other local caches and discovered one in a nearby park, Odessa Park. The park is also known as Sunnyside Neighborhood Park and has a skate park, handball court, and playground. Naturally, we had to try out the playground after making our 396th find.

Playground at Odessa Park

We made our own line for the tall slide. At first our prescholar climbed to the top and was too afraid to go down the slide. Mom climbed up with him and helped him go down the first time. After that, he was ready to slide by himself again and again. And again and again and again.

Sliding down the slide

That last patch of leftover snow made for an extra-soft landing.

Big brother sliding

The park has some other fun climbing equipment, including plastic rock arches. Our older son was able to climb up easily but wasn't immediately sure how to get back down. After a little thinking and repositioning, he was able to get his feet back on the ground.

King of the arch

One spinner was fun for my daughter, though the circular motion was never quite smooth enough. She had me spin her which was a little tricky with a camera in one hand.

She spins! She scores!

The more minimalist seat-spinners were also popular with the older kids. They had fun spinning and then trying to walk in a straight line while still slightly dizzy.

Spin master

The park also has little rocking animals that are really too small for my bigger kids. The prescholar was too invested in the big slide to even try.

Too old for a rocking horse?

Realizing we are so close to discovering geocache #400, we will probably make a bigger effort to find more in the near future. Plus, there was a CD in the cache that asked to be moved on to another cache, so we will listen and send it on its way.

Unpacking Update

Our household goods finally arrived last Monday (five days ago as I write). We've spent a busy week trying to unpack boxes, reorganize rooms, and return disassembled furniture to its original state. It's been fun but exhausting work, leaving no time for blogging.

The good news is everything on the packing list made it. No boxes were lost or smashed to bits or confiscated by customs (I was worried about my copy of Portal 2!). Not quite everything made it. We have an Ikea loft bed that the American movers took partially apart. They did not do a good job of keeping all the fiddly little bits with it. We made a trip to Ikea today to get some additional furniture and the missing screws, dowels, and bolts required to finish the bed. The bed is now complete. Jacob even tested out the ladder and the mattress and all works well.

I was happy to see this listed as number 42 on the packing list:

The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is...

A bookcase! Full of linens? I guess that makes as much sense as "42" does.

Books are pretty important in my opinion. If they don't have the ultimate answer, they can definitely help in discovering it. This poor bookshelf will be stocked with books once we get some shelves for our linen closet. Ikea was surprisingly unhelpful in that regard.

Worse than Ikea not solving all our problems, we did have one casualty in the move. Jacob's cheap plastic fireman's hat got crunched up in the move. The hat was in the bottom of a box, so I think it just suffered under the burden of supporting other items. My wife said we should write to the moving company to demand $80 for a fireman's hat (as long was we left out the words "plastic" and "child's" in its decription); I said we should demand £80!

I'm not sure it's the authentic style and color (colour?) of locally used hats

Things are slowly coming together. The study/guest room/man room can finally be properly organized now that the loft bed is not scattered in pieces all over the floor. We opened up the boxes of pictures to hang and need to decide where they should go. That's fun work, though not as fun as going through the books and re-alphabetizing them. That takes a while because of all the sampling I do as I go. Soon there will be time for reading again! Truly a happy time for us.