Have you ever taken your kids to the jumpy houses? They love it. The highlight of our camping trip was our jumpy house. We have a brand new tent. The last one leaked and was so miserable, I demanded a deluxe version. So Joe found us a fabulous tent and it even HAD a privacy screen. That was destroyed in mere moments. lol. Joe put up the tent and blew up the mattresses and I threw in the pillows and the kids discovered their new favorite jumpy tent. I think we had 10 kids in there at one point. Jumping, pillow fighting, hiding, laughing. From the outside, you could see shapes of arms, legs, heads, all bulging out the sides. For a while there I was not sure if we would actually have a tent by night fall. But how do you stop such a great time? You don't. We didn't. Instead, we were grateful we still had all four sides intact and no rips, except for that privacy screen. Joe added air before bedtime and I made the beds just before we got in them. They had a blast!
Now this was quite a day, we drove to the Ranch in the morning, drove to the campsite in late afternoon and set up, did the jumpy house, collected pine cones and sticks for the campsite fire, the kids played and explored. We ate dinner outside, hot dogs, hamburgers, Frito chili boats. We had a night time campfire site and all the boys sat around and told spooky stories. Like the gossip game, where one starts the story and then the next one adds to it and so on. Jeep is a natural born story teller and Reed was just as happy to participate. One story started off with a scary bunny, and Reed's part was, "And then the bunny jumped into the camp fire until there was nothing left but bones and a brain....." Of course with this age group of boys, no story is complete with out the poops and the farts. lol. And then there were smores! I love smores!
And then I got cranky. Hot all day, now cold, and dog tired. All boys in bed. They were asleep within moments. But oh, if only Reed would have stayed asleep. He burrows up and out of his sleeping bag, gets cold and then cries out. It was 35 degree's out there at night. We were not expecting it to get that cold. Joe and I had one sleeping bag and two blankets on top. I felt like our pillows froze at some point. But you know, you burrow in and eventually exhaustion will take over right? Not if you have to get up 6 or 7 times to get Reed back into the sleeping bag. neither one of us slept. I finally put Reed into bed with us, which left no room for "us" and I sat on the edge of my blow up mattress peeking out the tent window at the mess hall. Looking for any signs of life other than the coyotes howling. At 5:35 a.m. I saw shadows in the mess hall. Not caring about the coyotes, (I would pity them for crossing me at this point), or what those shadows were, I bolted out the tent door and headed straight to the mess hall. Where there were two men with all the burners on and A POT OF COFFEE!!!!! Whoooo Hooooo!!!!
And Joe and I survived another cub scout camping trip. We, who agreed when we first met that camping was the last thing either of us ever wanted to do, have survived and are planning for the next one. lol. I love all the pictures Joe took on this trip and am sorry I didn't snag the camera and get some shots of him too. Next time.....see planning already.
What is this? It's the reason I started blogging again. My dear sweet Hottie made this for me. It's a light box to put my cards in and get better pictures. I need to learn how to decorate it up a little, but I just love how much better the pictures come out. He also taught me how to use some basic computer "fixes" to take out all the yellow and sharpen the images. 
