Everything else

On Tuesday, we scrambled madly to gather and pack all our borrowed camping gear into our minivan.
I did take a little break in the evening to run over to the LYS to pick up a Louet Roving carder from an extremely generous guild member. (Hi Linda!) She's letting me borrow it in exchange for some homemade bread. Now that is bartering at its finest. My next post will display how this little wonder is transforming portions of my stash.

SO, we embarked on our very first camping trip to a somewhat local lake/state park. Mark and I spent no less than two hours-could've been longer, actually-to put up the Enormous Tent. The thing sleeps 7 and has an attached screened porch for bug-free dining. I was stunned at the size of that thing. And the fact that there were no instructions for putting it all together. Here's what B did while we were working on it.

Actually, this is what the 3 younger dc did 90% of the time we were at the campsite. The whole area was covered in a peculiar mixture of what appeared to be sand, ash, and some sort of fine grit. Every time one of the children poured it from one container to another, approximately one third of the stuff hovered magically in the air for about 2 minutes . Those who have had small children will be able to guess how often this was. (For anyone wondering about the other 10%-that was divided between sleeping and eating)

Sugar used the daylight hours for all her resting time...She woofed and whined nervously at all the strange night time noises. The marauding opossums with their weird hissing totally freaked her out. Mark got a little aggravated with her excessive vigilance, but I was very pleased-thought she did a great job!

The kids loved the beach area and would've stayed all day and burned to a crisp if we had permitted it. We went fishing a couple of times, hiked a smallish nature trail suitable for young fry and played on the playground. In all, we stayed two months, I mean, days before heading home. I joked with Mark that the smile I gave him as we entered our driveway was the first sincer one he'd seen the entire time. Truthfully, we probably will wait a couple of years before our next camping adventure. The younger two were a bit TOO young and their recognition of parental authority went right out the window as we pulled into the campsite. As one of my college professors used to say, "it's just hot water on the teabag". Camping was a little too much hot water for my little "tea bags" although they thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. And Mark and I got a good idea of what we need to work on :~)

Sadly, blogger is ignoring my attempts to add the other two photos to this post so...this will have to do until it gets over its little funk. I'll try to add them later.