In the woods...

Well, we had quite an interesting weekend. We started off with our first swimming lesson Saturday morning. That went pretty well, aside from the annoying fact that the pool was quite cold. Come on people, how are you going to convince skeptical and/or scared little kids to get into the water if it's freezing?? Anyway, Sonja was fine--she didn't make a peep the whole time and didn't seem to mind when I would put her on her back or float her on her tummy or anything like that. Peyton, on the other hand, was quite vocal and it took a lot of coaxing from Brad to get him to even kick. But he eventually did it (on his back and on his tummy), which was quite an accomplishment.

The interesting part of the weekend started after swimming. We went camping for the first time with the kids. We went with 3 other couples and their kids (ranging from 3 months to 2 years old) to a place called North-South Lake Campground in the Catskills of NY. It is quite a lengthy story so I won't retell it all here. But I think it's safe to say that we won't be going camping again anytime soon (which is a shame because we quite enjoy camping). It was a pretty unfortunate experience (although we LOVED seeing our friends who we don't get to see that often) and we actually bailed a day early. We felt like total wusses, but our friends told us later that we missed thunder and lightning storms and much frenzied last-minute packing up of the campsite before everything got soaked.

It was basically a combination of things that made it so bad: too much chaos with so many kids in an unrestrained area, cold weather which we were unprepared for, extremely needy dogs (which we were also unprepared for), wandering kids (ours), a horrible night with screaming kids (ours) and scared dogs that were climbing all over us, my bad back and Brad's lack of warm clothes which resulted in about 3 hours of decent sleep for us, fighting dogs (ours) scaring the crap out of the kids and actually drawing blood on each other (which has NEVER happened before), horrible carsickness (mine) on the way home, a dog (Douna) in terrible pain the whole way home because he's just too old for this, and most of all, too much stress worrying about all of the above.

BUT, aside from that, we had a good time. :)


The scene


I command thee, fire, rise!


Josh and Jenn enjoying a beer


Peyton enjoying his favorite food


What are you doing, Colin?


Eva


A priceless shot of Ada


Reading around the campfire


Liv and Hettie reading

--C.