In addition, Saturday, April 24 is National Junior Ranger Day. Kid-friendly activities will be held, along with the chance for children to earn a junior ranger patch.

Earth Day is April 22 and many national parks are hosting special events and volunteer projects. Check out the National Park Service site for more information!

This year my board game choice was Cashflow 101, produced by Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad fame. I have looked longingly at this game for the past two Christmases, but the price always made me turn away and purchase something else. I have no clue what games I did buy those two years, as no one played them, therefore making them bad investments. Cashflow 101, though, has proven to be an excellent investment, even with its hefty price tag. The only one who has not played it at least twice so far is Bill. My son-in-law has even taken to driving a four-hour round trip on his days off to play the game. I am not sure that is a good investment on his part, given the price of gas. But it was nice to see my four children (three children, one son-in-law) all around the dining room table playing at getting out of the rat race.

Escaping the rat race is the main goal of Cashflow 101. In order to accomplish this, the game forces you to begin thinking differently about your money. A big screen TV is not an asset, nor is a boat, not a true money-earning asset. By delaying purchasing things you want in the game and actually putting your money to work in a money-making asset, like a rental home or dividend paying stock, then you can begin to use the money your assets are earning you to finance those things you want to buy. The key is to see those moneymaking possibilities, to recognize them as opportunities rather than throwing up your hands and declaring that you cannot afford them.

Each person in the game begins with a career and an accompanying income and expense sheet. You quickly see that while some careers pay more, there are also more expenses (college loans, etc.) and it seems that those who make more always have higher expenses (bigger house, more toys, etc.). Having a child greatly increases your monthly expenses. Along the way you have the opportunity to buy stocks, invest in real estate, buy boats, give to charity, all real-life possibilities. In order to get out of the rat race you must grow your passive income (income earned from investments) to the point where it is higher than your expenses, thus allowing you to quit your day job.

Once you have played the game successfully a few times, escaped the rat race, then you are encouraged to make up your own “career” cards, using your current, present-day career and expenses. This enables you to see how you can actually implement the ideas of the game into your own life, using your own finances.

Not only is this a great game for beginning to view your finances in a more opportunistic way, but it is also a great game for honing your math skills. Each roll of the dice causes you to have to refigure your balance sheet, make decisions based upon ROI (return on investment), bank loan repayments, percentages, etc. Lots of math involved here!

Final analysis? Even though this game has a pretty hefty initial investment, it’s ROI appears to be very good. Only time will tell whether the game truly makes a difference in our financial lives. But its entertainment value is high and it is a great learning tool for reinforcing ones math skills. That makes it a better investment than many other games I have purchased in the past. I definitely recommend it for your family.

If you would like to continue sharing my personal musings and mischief, please mosey on over to Musings, Mischief and Mayhem. I would love it if you would subscribe there also!

For the next few days, this site will be undergoing some changes. A new background will soon appear, along with revamped homeschool links. The archived personal posts will disappear (don’t panic! You can read them over at Musings, Mischief and Mayhem), leaving only those relevant to homeschooling / unschooling and the Leaping From The Box website.

Hopefully the changes will result in a more relevant and helpful blog. If you have suggestions about what you would like to see here, please leave me a comment!

So lately I have been checking the labels of items I want to buy just to see where they are made, mostly out of curiosity to begin with, but now with more concern. For several months I tried to find bath towels that were made in the USA and fit my budget, two seemingly disparate criteria. Finally I found some at Sam’s Club, of all places! And just yesterday I was looking at potato mashers at Publix. They had three different brands, all made in China. Now a potato masher is probably not going to have lead paint on it and likely is pretty safe to buy, no matter where it is made. But still! Is there anything still manufactured in America?

With all that in mind, I have been thinking ahead to Christmas and what I might want to get for Miss Munchkin. She recently discovered baby dolls, but a trip to Toys R Us a couple of weeks ago was not real fruitful in that department. So I spent part of this afternoon looking for dolls made in the good ole USA. And actually found a couple. And some others that were made in Europe. Research indicates that the EU (European Union) has more stringent quality controls that the US, so likely any toy made in the EU is going to be as safe, if not safer, than any toy made here. That’s good to know.

I liked the Corolle dolls found at Kazoo Toys. Their website indicates the dolls are “designed in France” but does that mean they are made in France? I guess I will have to contact them to be sure.

The Kinder dolls at www.usmadetoys.com are cute.

Nico & Zoe has some cute cloth dolls.

If you are looking for toys made in America, or at least not made in China, here’s a couple of websites that will be very helpful:

10 Lead-Free Toys Made in USA.

Toys Made in America — Extensive list of American toy companies, brands and products.

I am definitely looking for a baby doll suitable for an almost two-year-old little girl this Christmas, so if you know where I can find one that is not made in China, leave me a comment! Thanks!

Mr. Algae-Eater seems to have recovered nicely. I bought some sort of aloe juice medicine that was supposed to be for sores on fish and added it each day for a week. It seemed to do the trick. He’s back to his old self.

We did take a trip to Tallahassee last week and Bill interviewed for a position with a company there. He liked the company, so now we are just waiting to see if they liked him enough to hire him. Or if they thought they needed his experience enough to hire him, as they have a huge mess to clean up. Hopefully we’ll hear soon. Bill and I really liked it there. The sunshine, the warmth, the beach, the seafood. It was very nice.

Christmas was a quiet day. Several of us have colds, others have been stressed and working too many hours. So we just watched movies and played with Miss Munchkin and tried to keep the wrapping paper out of her mouth. The best gift seemed to be the Flexible Flyer horse we got her. It didn’t take long for her to figure out how she could move to get the horse moving. It is going to be a while, though, before she’ll be able to ride it herself.

And I bought her a stocking that had the head of a cat at the top of it. I was going to make her a stocking. I got all of 4 rows done on it. I’ll have to finish it next year. But the cat stocking was a big hit. Miss Munchkin loves “fluffies” and all day long she’d carry that stocking around and put her face right down into the cat’s face and make her “kitty cat” noise, which is sort of a cross between a meow and a purr and a dinosaur growl. Very cute. That’s what she’s doing in these pictures, in addition to trying to eat the nose of the cat!