I know, I know. Where have I been, my loyal reader (here's a shout out to Billy, my husband here) is asking. Well, I've been in school, driving to school, driving home from school, driving to the store...and the like. We also had a three day weekend in case you had heard. Not just me, the whole country.

Usually we like to do a big project around here when there's a few days off, and as scheduled, we were going to replace our countertops. Unfortunately it didn't happen, so we decided to have "family time". We drove up to the mountains on Saturday to geocache ( www.geocaching.com ) and visit my favorite place besides the beach: The Outlets.

After spending an hour of telling the kids over and over that, "no you can't have a treat from the Gap" we decided to leave the outlets and head out to find our geocache. Billy mapped a couple out in downtown Keystone and we were on our way. I personally hate the GPS, and think it's a crock. If I was lost in the woods, I promise you that a GPS could not help me. Unless it was edible. I never understand how to read what it's saying and if I breathe on the thing, I delete everything.

I drove, and Billy navigated. We found the first cache in about two seconds-major letdown. However, the second one was much harder to find. Plus the walking bridge that would lead us to the cache was out, so we didn't know what to do. We almost rented bikes to ride instead and asked the guy at the bike rental place how much it was and where you can ride around Keystone Village. He was so rude! First he told us how much it cost, and then he said, "Where CAN'T you ride around here. You have more places to ride around here than you'd ever want to do", as if we were absolute idiots. Then Billy asked him about the geocache we were trying to find and he inquired of Billy, "is this legal?" At this point I grabbed all three kids and walked them to the park a block away before I asked him where he got his degree in customer service.

After I pouted at the park about rude people and broken bridges, Billy told us all to get up and start walking. I like when he gets bossy so I followed him. He took us a back way to the bridge and we sneaked our way around until we found a path that would lead us to our cache. Four year old Will was the first to find it, and has been reminding us how amazing he is for the past three days.

On Labor Day we took the kids up the road towards Mount Evans to hike up Chief Mountain. I thought it was going to be fairly easy, and we invited some friends with kids to come along too. I'm so glad they came. They are the ones we camped with a few weeks ago, and are always prepared for anything.

All we brought was some water and a plastic bag with four bananas.

My kids were so glad Amy had packed snacks for her girls. They kept asking for her Twizzlers and goldfish, as if I never gave them anything fun. And poor Billy almost threw up at base camp, from all the sugar he was burning. He ate some fruit leather, AND the banana I packed for him though, and was fit as a fiddle after that.

It was an amazing view, and a great hike for families, if you happen to be the hiking kind. Seriously! One of the best hikes we've done.

In other news, the baby of our family started preschool this week. Will went today for the first time, and when I picked him up, his report was good. As for the other kids, Jack is getting closer to memorizing 1-12 times tables, and Faith is about to skip first grade and go into 8 th. She also just lost her very first tooth. It was traumatic at first, but now she's happily flaunting. My classes are going well, but I have yet to take any tests. I'll let you know if I flunk out or not after tomorrow when I am tested over the Endocrine system. The only real goal I have this week is to feed my family something other than chicken tacos/beef tacos.

This is life as I know it.

Later Peeps.