Picture Overload!!
One of Aaron's birthday presents was his own tent for our family. We had been using his parents' gear for the past several years. We got a bit of extra gear like Carson's sleeping bag and a cooler, and made plans for our first trip of the summer. We drove to nearby Pike Lake in Kettle Morraine National Forest. We went fairly early in the day on Wednesday and luckily got a site that we could set up right away, instead of waiting until 3 for another camper to move out. All set up, we ate a picnic lunch and explored a bit.
Thanks to some reorganizing of our storage and an idea on Pinterest, I've got a tote dedicated to camping, complete with a list I can check off, wipe off, and reuse on the inside of the tote lid. Nice to feel organized!
This is how Cole spent the first couple of hours - setting up, lunch, and a little more.
We found a self-guided nature hike, the path for which started just beyond our campsite. It said it was only .8 miles, but I'm fairly certain it was closer to two miles. It was a nice excercise, though, with plenty of hills and valleys to wear out the kids. Oh, wait. I was the worn out one; they were still wound when we got back. :)
When we got back, the kids all wanted a drink. The water was just across from our campsite. Aaron knew that the water overshot the bowl and used it to play a trick on the girls. This was Evie, coming up and telling me, "Daddy got my shirt all wet!" and she was not happy about it.
They had no qualms, though, when he played the same trick on Carson.
After a snack, we headed out to Pike Lake. It was a perfect temperature, perfect depth. The beach sloped gently down until it was about mid-thigh on Aaron and stayed that depth all the way out to the bouoys. It meant Evie was comfortable walking out to them and back.
This is where Cole was. He did a brief stint where I took him and splashed his feet in, but he really wasn't in the mood, so he and I went back to the grassy hill beyond the beach, he had a bottle, and we took pictures with the long lens.
We went back to the campsite after a couple of hours in the water. The kids got ready for bed and I blew up mattresses and readied sleeping bags while Aaron took the grill and got dinner ready. The fire ban had been lifted, but we hadn't brought fire stuff, having expected the ban to stay.
No camping trip would be complete without these fixings, so we brought them out and dumped the charcoal from the grill into the firepit to perfect them.
Mmmmm! S'mores!
Such a perfect day. And then, that day ended. I have no pictures of the ensuing madness, but it was mad. Someone came by and let us know that there was some rain and 50 mph wind coming. So we hunkered down, made last minute bathroom trips, and tucked the kids in 20 times. Then the rain came. And came, and came and came. From 7:30 until 9, we listened to the rain and chased kids back into sleeping bags. Then I was thinking about when we left and I couldn't remember...had I turned off the stove from boiling eggs? And if I even had, had I moved them to the fridge so they wouldn't be spoiled? EEK! For half an hour, I stewed and tried to remember, but I couldn't let it go. So I got Carson, who still wasn't sleeping by that point, and drove the 40 minutes back to the house. Where everything was JUST FINE. I felt so silly. I drove the 40 minutes back to the camp, talking with my sister to keep me awake. Back in the tent, we checked Aaron's phone and it was only 11:15. The rain was still coming. Cole woke up crying. Ugh. In the scramble to get things out of the open, the bottle and formula and extra diapers got to the car instead of the tent. So I ran through the rain to retrieve the bottle and formula and fed him and we went back to sleep, now about midnight. 2:15 am, Carson woke up literally screaming. He desperately needed a diaper change, and I desperately didn't want to go back to the car. Too bad I'd forgotten them before. To the car and back, soggy, I got the diapers and changed the poor sad boy. Sometime around there, we noticed the tent was dripping right over Cole's portion of the bed. Aaron went out to fix the rain fly, since it was loose and that's what caused the pooling drip; I went for a potty run and got more wet. We slept fitfully from about 3am until 6:30, when the kids rose with the sun. AH! The sun! Sometime, it'd stopped raining.
The kids and I got ready for the day and tried to lay things so they'd dry out better. Aaron manned the cookstove and got pancakes, bacon and hot cocoa for us. While we ate, he did the dishes. This guy's a great husband and dad, but he's a DREAM to camp with! :)
Guess where Cole was? That's right. Honestly, he didn't spend ALL his time in the carseat, it's just that those were the only times I took pictures; otherwise I was wearing him in my mei tai.
After breakfast and cleanup, we packed a snack and took the hike to the observation tower at the top of Powder Hill. Lizzie was so funny; she dragged her feet the entire way up the hill, then was so excited to get to the top of the tower, she ran up the stairs. See my family there at the bottom of the tower? Yep. It was big.
We saw this neat tree on our way up and again on the way down. We thought it looked so silly, like the tree swallowed a balloon and someone blew it up or something. A funny little bulge in the middle.
Besides the hours between seven and seven, we felt the camping trip was a complete success. We'll be going again soon, to a different site, for a whole new experience!
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