This is a picture of us on our latest letterbox hunt. The 'extra' child on the end in the light brown coat is our niece Sophia. Of course, she thinks she is just one of us! For those of you who are not familiar with letterboxing please check it out at www.letterboxing.org or www.atlasquest.com. We began this hobby this summer and we have thoroughly enjoyed it. In the photo we are on Trail 15 at Caesar's Head. It was a beautiful trail with a waterfall, a cave and lots of colorful leaves! The letterbox was actually hidden on top of the cave in a hollow at the base of a tree. The stamp inside was a Little Caesar's pizza guy, which we all thought was funny. We have now found 19 boxes!! We also planted a box at Caesar's Head just beyond the Devil's Kitchen. We entitled it, appropriately, "Devil's Delirium".

Wow! We are having a great fall. School is going very well. Abbey continues to be extremely self motivated. I often find her doing her next lessons without being told. Very weird since I am used to the boys, who hope I will somehow forget that they need to be educated and hide until I call them for school.  Jenna is learning to add and read her 'popcorn' words. These are high frequency sight words such as can, we, the. etc... She also has been reading some very simple three letter words on her own. Eli and Benn are doing some great writing. I will post some of that next. We are reading Where the Red Fern Grows together. An amazing story of perserverance and love! The boys would have read it all by now, but we are taking it slow so we can do projects and discussions along the way. We just finished our Botany book and are finally headed into Astronomy.  We have put off History until after the holidays. That's what we ended up doing last year and it worked well, so in Jan we will continue with the Middle Ages. We are also zooming through the new Math curriculum. The boys seem to be 'getting' it so much more often than they did with our old curriculum. I think we made a good change.

We have spent the last week working with one other family on a gingerbread house entry for the Grove Park Inn's (in Asheville, NC) yearly contest. We are doing a replica of the Candyland board game. I will post pics as soon as we are finished. The kids have come up with some great ideas! I thought I was going to be the idea person here, but they seem to be getting pretty clever. We are pretty sure our chances of winning are slim. The houses on display there are unbelievable!!! But we are very excited about seeing our name on a house at THE Grove Park Inn! The display dates/times are Nov. 20-Jan. 06 You can go see them for free on Mondays -Thursdays. If you want to see them on the weekend, you must be a guest of the Inn. Hope some of you can make it up to see! There are so many wonderful houses it is way worth the trip up the mountain.