Categories
Fitness & Recipes

Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Muffins

Pumpkin Oatmeal CC MuffinsI seriously love pumpkin. Pumpkin in the form of a muffin with chocolate chips is pure bliss. My kids seriously gobbled these up. With wheat flour, oatmeal, brown sugar, canola oil, and pumpkin I’ve designated these as a vegetable and deemed them appropriate for any time of the day!

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Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
Yields about 30 muffins
Adapted from tasteofhome.com

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 eggs
2 cups pumpkin (or just throw in the whole, small can)
3/4 cup milk (I used soy)
3/4 cup canola oil

2 cups wheat flour
1 cup white flour
6 tsp baking powder
3 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp cloves
1 1/2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda

3 cups oats
1 cup dark chocolate chips (or however many you want to throw in!)

Mix the dry ingredients together. Mix the wet ingredients (or if you are lazy like me, do the wet first and then just sift in the dry into the same bowl). Mix well together.

Gently stir in oats and chocolate chips.
Prepare muffin tins, and pour batter in so they are 3/4 full.
Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 min. (mine needed 18).

Try not to eat too many in one sitting!

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Categories
Daily Life

Hundreds of days, and counting!

Crater Lake NP_29I began to wonder today how long we had been traveling. Our ‘getting started’ date is a little fuzzy due to starting with a house-swap before Airstream travel and a short break selling the house. I decided to fix our ‘start’ on November 13th, 2013 when we drove south from Virginia, but not count the 55 days we spent back in Utah selling our house.

As of today, that makes 421 days on the road! Actually doing the math and figuring it made me realize the scope of this adventure we are on. We’ve seen 27 states (14 since November 13th 2013) and briefly visited both Canada and Mexico.

I’ve added a day counter to the blog, so we can more easily keep track of this statistic. Look for it in the left sidebar. Part of my inspiration to keep track of our journey comes from Tim over at WatsonsWander. He recently created an infographic site to detail their travels, and did an awesome job.

We have no idea how long our adventure will be, or of what form it will take. Our goal is to maximize the benefit to our family in experience, in learning, and in service. Our goal is not necessarily a large number, but a meaningful one. May each of these days be invested wisely!

Categories
Arizona Featured Destination National Parks

My Obsession With Cactus Gets Even Stronger – Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

This National Monument is the only place in the United States where you can find Organ Pipe Cactus! Go and see our adventure to know why you should add this place to your bucketlist!

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument has been on my “must-see” list since we visited Arizona last year and I developed a slight obsession with all sorts of prickly plants. We didn’t have the time to venture south of Tucson, but we’ve more than made up for it this time around!

When We Visited: February 16-18, 2015
Ages of Kids: 9, 7, 4
Where We Stayed: Twin Peaks Campground. The only thing we didn’t approve of were the strict generator hours! Totally interfered with our hiking & exploring.

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The Organ Pipe Cactus is only found in the United States in this park. There is large concentration of them in Mexico (the park is smack dab next to the border), but if you don’t have a passport, this is the only spot to see them! These plants look like giant, upside-down octopus. The largest one we saw was along the Ajo Mountain Drive. It also was a MUTANT cactus, or a CRESTED cactus (it doesn’t get much better than that!). This anomoly occurs when a new arm of the cactus starts, but pushes out with the new growth forming a line instead of a circle. The resulting fan shape also occurs in saguro cactus, though it doesn’t usually grow linearly as this one did.

We are also getting into the flowering/fruit season of the cactus. This Prickly Pear was starting to have fruit although they won’t be ripe until last summer when the monsoons arrive in the desert.

Here’s Sam and Rachel standing next to it for a size comparison:

At the back of the 21-mile loop is the Arch Canyon Trail. Although you can see the arch from the parking lot, the BEST part of the hike is back up in the canyon. Its a little steep and scrambly, but the views are SO worth it. We couldn’t believe how GREEN everything was. The Sonoran Desert really is beautiful. The green creosote is everywhere and gives the area an almost forest- like appearance. Add to that the cool canyon breezes and I was having a serious case of home-sickness for the Utah mountains.

The Agave is also one of my favorite plants even if it isn’t a cactus. I found this one near the top of our hike.
One morning I actually managed to drag myself out of bed to photograph the sunrise. The one thing I wanted (photographically speaking) was a silhouetted Organ Pipe Cactus with a beautiful sky. Sam gets up early to work and sees beautiful sunrises all the time, and when I cracked an eyelid he told me this one would be worth it. It totally was.

This is an Ocotillo – also not a cactus but very cool looking. Native Americans used to use the branches to make roofs, fences and all sorts of useful things. When there’s not enough rain, they’ll shed their leaves and look quite dead and ugly. Luckily, there’s been quite a bit of rain recently and we got to see them fully dressed!

Organ Pipe NM_09We thoroughly enjoyed our stay in this park! Even though it is quite a ways out into the desert, its definitely worth the trek!

Categories
Homeschool

Book Review: Little Miss: A father, His Daughter and Rocket Science by Nathan Meikle

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A few months ago, we found out that a college acquaintance of ours had written book. Excited for him, I dug in to find out what it was about and was pleasantly surprised to find out his book is a memoir about teaching his two year old to read. Intrigued, I requested a copy of the book to review and he enthusiastically complied.

I loved it. His story is a journey of teaching his daughter to read, learning how important reading is to young children, and that although we may sometimes worry about “too early”, learning to read is a skill that can never be learned too soon. Opening a world of learning and excitement to kids can benefit them for their entire lives.

He cites documentation and research he completed through this process and has an appendix with a list of their favorite 250 children’s books! Along with the reading journey, he also shares a bit of his personal journey playing football, his dedication to getting a scholarship, attending law school and earning a Ph.D.

While his experience was interesting to read about, Cara is already over two years old so I had a little trouble relating directly to his experience.  The biggest take away I received from this book was the desire to sit down and read TO her. I’ll admit, that traveling has put a crimp on read a loud time. Rachel and Andrew go through books so fast that I can’t keep up with them, and Cara just gets left to fend for herself. Picture books are harder to come by through our library’s OverDrive system, so mostly we just don’t try.

After I finished Nate’s book, I put a lot more effort into reading aloud to Cara. We listen to quite a few audio books while we drive, and we read aloud to all of the kids before bedtime, but Cara and I lacked some serious one-on-one time. Its been great! Habits are hard to come by and we still struggle, but we have been doing much better over the last few months.

If you have young kids, or are interested in learning what they did to teach Kayla to read, I definitely recommend checking out this book! Its been a great resource for us and I’m glad that we have it.

Get it on Amazon here: Little Miss: a father, his daughter, and rocket science.

Categories
Airstream Meetups California National Parks

A Little TOO Social Sometimes? Meet up in the Mojave National Preserve

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When I think of a nomad, wandering existence it can appear to be pretty lonely. Constantly in new places, no neighborhood friends to see everyday, and a new church congregation every week.

We’ve found, however, that sometimes just the opposite is true. Life can get a little TOO social sometimes. With many full-time families and couples on the road or preparing to hit the road, there are myriads of opportunities for social engagements.

Add the weather into account, and we have realized that during the winter most everyone is in southern California, Arizona, or Florida and chances are we’ll run into a few (or a lot) of travelers.

Recently, we had a rather fun meet-up in Mojave Desert National Preserve with 4 other families. Its fun how traveling with one other family (we’d been hanging out with the ADVODNA crew for at least a week already) can snowball into a large potluck with hoards of children running around like crazies. It’s fantastic!

We met up with David & Bridget from @journeywithhappiness:

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Amber & Todd from @campytrails:

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Jason & his girls from @ramblingfamily (the approved non-Airstream interloper – his wife and eldest daughter were in Texas for work & orthodontist appts):

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and, of course, Dave & Ann from @advodna_dave / @advodna_ann

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The other nice thing about meeting up with other traveling families is they all know we aren’t on vacation. Most everyone works, kids have nap time, other kids have to do school work. People are generally laid back, no stress, and don’t need to hang out every second of every day. We generally all did our own thing in the evenings, but one night we decided to get together for a campfire and potluck dinner. We even put the kids to bed and had some adult time around the campfire afterwards as well!

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Another fun thing to do in Mojave National Preserve is hiking! Surprisingly, there are some great trails in the area both near Hole in the Wall Campground and elsewhere in the park. The kids and I left early one morning to drive the 40 minutes to the Teutonia Peak Trail. The trail is flat for about a mile and then climbs about 700 ft up into the hills for a great view of the park. I was pretty impressed with my kids, and even more impressed with myself for taking them while Sam worked!

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Near the Hole in the Wall Visitor Center
there’s also the Rings Loops Trail that we hiked one afternoon as a group. The trail circles the base of one of the buttes, and then climbs out of a canyon using these rings bolted into the side of the rock. With 3 dogs and a few small kids we had a good time getting everyone up and over but we made it!

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We had also heard rumors that the Kelso Depot (main visitor center), as well as the Kelso Dunes were worth a visit, but they were too far from our campground to reasonable drive in. Mostly, we just enjoyed relaxing, talking with friends, and enjoying the amazing desert sunsets. Before we all headed our separate ways, David pulled out his drone and let Sam take his hand at creating a “dronie” video. Check it out!

This park suprised us with its beauty and wide variety of activities. It is definitely worth a visit (or two) if you are in the area!