Vermont Flat Stanley

A great big thanks to the wonderful family in Barton, Vermont who hosted Flat Stanley! He had such a great time. This was Owen's Ninja Stanley. He got to go sledding, make snow angels, tap maple syrup, and even get strapped onto a paper airplane for a ride!





From the questionare:
Your Flat Stanley came all the way to my city, Barton, Vermont.
While he was here, these are some of the exiting things he saw and did: "Stanley had a great time. His favorite part of being here was playing outside in the snow. He really enjoyed making snow-angels, and making planes with me. Stanley also had a great time exploring through the woods and even got to help us tap some maple trees".
The distance between Asheville, NC and Barton, VT is approximately 1050 miles.
If Flat Stanley should come back to visit, he should wear: "mittens, a hat, coat, boots, ski-pants", because the climate here is "cold and snowy from Octover to the end of April!"
Some other interesting facts about my city include:
"The Barton River runs north towards Canada!
In 1810 Runaway pond flooded Barton with millions of gallons of water in the greatest natural catastrophe in Orleans County post columbia history. The whole pond drained!
In 2004, Phish played their final concert. It was the single largest gathering of people in out town with 70,000 people!
There are 85 homeschooled students. 2, 780 people live in Barton.
The early settlers found wigwams by Barton pond. They say an Indian Foosah killed 27 moose by this pond in the winter of 1783.
Around 1900 a granite quarry was located on crystal lake.
Henry Leland who was an inventor, and engineer, created and named both the original Cadillac and Lincoln companies."

The First Stanley Comes Home!

We are so excited to get our first Stanley back! He went all the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was one that Reed sent out, so he was especially excited. His host family took him lots of neat places like Old Town and the Rio Grande Zoo. They sent him back with great souveniers that he's sharing with us, like pencils, cookie mix (yum!), a pepper-shaped cookie cutter, post cards and maps. Thanks so much Albuquerque family!!

We also went to the craft store today to buy scrapbooks so we can keep all the souveniers of Stanley's adventures :)

Today, we took our Stanleys to our friendly, neighborhood Staples store to be protected by a super power force field (aka lamination)... fortunately, the clerk did not seem to mind being hovered over by two 7-year-old boys and being told all about Stanley!



That was easy!!

We got a huge number of responses when we asked for host families for Stanley. We have marked on our maps all of the offers we have gotten. It's obviously too many for one time, but after our first batch of Stanleys come back, we'll probably send them on new adventures! The blue arrows are places that they are going RIGHT NOW ... the red arrows are future destinations :)

My first blog!

I need a way to document a project we're starting - so here's the easiest solution I could come up with! We've read the Flat Stanley book by Jeff Brown, in which a boy named Stanley is flattened by a board falling on him... He finds it quite useful to be completely flat - he can slip under doors, go through gratings, and be mailed across the country to his friend in California in a large envelope.

We are living a bit vicariously through him, and made a bunch of our own Flat Stanleys to send around the World! It works like this - we send a paper boy in an envelope with a short questionaire about the host family and their town. The family treats Stanley as their guest for a week, taking him interesting places and hopefully snapping some photos or grabbing him a postcard to remember his adventures. They send them back to us with photos, the questionaire filled out, and anything else they want to send.

Both Clay & Reed are doing this, along with one of their best friends, Owen. I put a request for host families on a message board of homeschoolers, as well as asking anyone on my email contacts who lives somewhere far away from Asheville. We'll post all the results here :)

So far, we have 35 families that want to help out! An overwhelming response, really ... And this is only about 8 hours after posting the request! These are ranging from right down in South Carolina, all across America from New England to California, to the Netherlands, Germany, Bahrain, India, Rome and Northern Canada. This is making it very hard for the boys to choose! So far they've made 15 Stanleys total - they may make more or just send them on multiples trips.

Reed working hard
Here's the whole clan of Stanleys - more may be added, but this is the work of 3 very motivated boys! True to the town they are from, they are full of the "asheville flavor" and we have Tattoo Stanley, Astroid-Boy Stanley, Ninja Stanley and even Crystal Stanley.