Full of Surprises!

There are two things I have done as an adult that have REALLY surprised my friends from childhood.  The first is giving birth naturally.  Alot of jaws dropped after I had Bronwyn.  Apparently, I am not viewed as very tough...  :)  The second is I have taken my kids camping.  Here's the proof.

(We are smiling so big because our kids are all asleep!)

Two weekends ago we spent a night at Bruneau with two other families.  It was SO fun.  There were 10 kids in all, so needless to say, we didn't exactly have any time to socialize with our friends.  But none-the-less, it was great.  We spent the first part of the night at the observatory.  I have always loved star gazing, and wanted to be an astronomer until I learned that you don't just get to look at stars all the time.  Seriously, Astronomy was my second hardest class in all of college.  But I absolutely loved looking through telescopes with my girls, and sharing my love of the night sky with them.  We got to see Saturn's rings, a nebula, and watch the full moon rise.  It was amazing.  (Poor Todd missed half of it because Ty was soooo tired.  They had to moonlight in the van...)

We spent Saturday morning at the sand dunes, which was a real highlight.  There's something about running down a sand dune that just makes you feel like a kid again.  Then you climb back up and remember how old you are!  Yikes, that was a workout!  So much fun though, and totally worth having to vacuum my van out the second we got home.  :)

The kids crashed hard on the drive home.  Aren't they so cute all sleeping the same way?  Added bonus: Bronwyn is holding a sucker in her mouth!  Less than a week later, we loaded them up again and headed to McCall to camp with Todd's family.

McCall has become mine and Todd's special place.  We said "I love you" for the first time while we were there, and since then we have enjoyed visiting McCall with our kids, family, and friends.  This was our first camping trip there, and it was great.  I think the main highlight for the kids was getting to stay for 2 nights instead of just 1.  While they fell asleep, I taught them how to play "would you rather".  They thought it was hilarious.  And it was pretty unanimous that having green hair would be better than black teeth.  :)

Not only did uncle Brett cook most of the food (which was delicious!), he also got all 5 kids to stay in one place for more than 2 minutes.  A true miracle worker!

Bronwyn went off pouting, and luckily I was able to turn her mood around with a little mommy-daughter hike.  She loved finding tree stumps and bugs.

The hardest part of the weekend was keeping Ty alive.  He spent alot of time in his bike seat, attached to his leash, or in the tent.

There are no pictures of us biking, even though we spent a huge amount of time riding!  I kept forgetting my camera, and the picture of all of us that my mother in law emailed me won't upload to the blog!  But we really enjoyed riding our bikes together!

We pounded a lot of smores!  My father in law loves to get unflattering pictures of me, lol!

On the drive home we pretended it wasn't Sunday, and hit our favorite McCall restaurant, the Pancake House.  Bronwyn was really excited to get this huge cinnamon roll.  I was even more excited to eat about 90% of it when we got home.  :)