Hello all,
New here obviously and having a blast geocaching. A friend of ours told us about geocaching, so we went out and tried one that was created by Knight2000 right down the road from us. The boys (ages 8 and 5) were thrilled! I found the whole thing pretty fascinating - so we were hooked!
That was our first find, and we had taken the time to read the story called "Meet Jack Black." Cute story that we could relate to (we have two strays here too). My oldest son took the time to sew a little pouch to put cat nip in, and we stuck a note on there that it was for "Jack Black."
My youngest son LOVES anything with the name Knight2000 on it! :-)
Points being, our first few finds were interesting caches - and we have put a lot of thought into what to trade for things the kids (and CO) may find. Personally as the mom and dad - we don't take anything, but we leave things and make sure the kids always trade up or trade equal. We also do our best to write everything down so we can post on the CO's cache page. We always sign the log book. We have replaced a couple plastic bags when needed.
I wish everyone (especially folks with kids) would take that same amount of time to consider the kiddos that find these caches. My kids work hard to find good trades, so when they find a cache that has very cheap, dirty items, or things that they can't play with (like a business card, old paper coupon, etc) it's not very exciting for them. Don't get me wrong, we all love the hunt and the nicer places to visit.
Not every cache can be a great one, and most have not been too bad, but a couple could use some folks like us to make it interesting for the next finders. ;-)
I'm guessing what happens, concerning the kid friendly caches - that kids being kids - can easily think that a broken trinket is worth as much as a nice old collectible hotwheel car that's in nice shape. Worse yet, they take a thing or two with no trade at all to replace it, leaving the next kiddos to find basically nothing interesting. It really is up to the parents to monitor this, and teach their children about picking up trash laying around - and what trading up or equal means.
We have taken about 8 kids together (once), to two different caches. The other kids didn't exaclty know about geocaching yet - and were being introduced, so their trade items were not so good - if they had any at all. It was just a quick last minute idea to get a few kids out, so we should have done a better job letting the parents know the whole story.
Here's what happened:
My boys pulled out their trade bags and the other kids would either a. - take what my kids just put in, or b. - take something DIRECTLY OUT of my boys cache bags. I didn't really mind, as long as the cache got filled back up with other things that would make another kid cacher happy on the find.
Here is what we do, in case it would help others...
1. First we go through the house looking for things that might make interesting finds, toys the kids are willing to part with, things like new shoe strings, plastic bags, pens and pencils, etc.
We check all toys to be sure there are no broken parts, and we clean them if they need cleaned. We'll even make things like the catnip bag for Jack Black. :-)
2. We go to the dollar store looking for interesting/helpful things. Stuff like bottles of hand sanitizer, bug spray wipes, pens, etc.
3. We go to local thrift stores and a junk store that's down the road for other cool cache ideas. We found some test tubes and small glass eyedroppers that would be interesting to just about anyone. Older cachers can probably use the tubes for micro caching, kids can use them for stashing small rocks and other tiny things.
4. When we are out (most recently to a gem show), we look for things that would be interesting for kids to find in a cache. We also think of the parents, as a bug spray wipe or a bottle of hand sanitizer could be a very helpful find.
The gem show we went to yesterday has a gem mining area. I spent probably $10.00 letting the boys hunt rocks JUST for geocaching. (plus the other 10+ for the boy's own collections).
As we walked around, I noticed a big stack of small paper sheets that have a buck off coupon, and all the info listed on the next gem show in the fall. I snagged about 30-40 of them, and cleared that with the akron lapidary club. We know a guy high up the chain there and let him know why we pulled the coupon papers - he laughed and shook his head. :-)
We did ONE cache after the gem show, since it was right in that area - hehehehe... and I made a small bag with some fool's gold, an arrow head, a desert rose, and a piece of peacock ore. I also included a handwritten note, and one of those sheets of paper that tell about the fall gem show.
When we got home, we started putting together small rock bags. One is a testube FULL of the TINIEST little rocks, including the very pretty peacock ore, iron pyrite (fools gold), quartz, etc.
Others are large pretty "Mystery Rocks" in which the goal of that find is to figure out what type of stone it is.
One contains a nice "apache tear" and says to look up the stone online.
All of our rock bags included a handwritten note on an index card, one of those sheets of paper with info on the next gem show (so another interested child might be able to go learn more) and everything is in a ziplock bag ready to go.
Now, all that and finally a question! LOL!
Is it ok for me to include that gem show sheet of paper, since it could be viewed by some as an advertisement? Or would they recognize the goal of our cache trades, which is to be educational and fun for the kids to find?
I've written enough now, but that's what we've got so far. We have 11 finds now, and hope to hide our own soon. :-)
