Camping

We went camping! Some may call us crazy for taking our 2 kids up there just the 4 of us (well, and Lucy), but in my mind our kids are at the perfect stage for camping, and it won't come around again for a couple years! Ashlyn's fine from now on, of course, it'll just be Elan who will be a huge pain to camp with in the next couple years! Once he is mobile...the camping fun will be over for a couple of years, that's something we learned with Ashlyn! 

We got some tips from some Jerome friends on where to go. We headed up to the Ketchum/Sun Valley area. We camped about 10-15 miles north of Ketchum, it was really pretty and nice. It was fun to drive through Hailey and Ketchum on our way up, too. We haven't been up that way in several years. I didn't realize how close we live to it now! Now that we know, we'll be going more often!

Anyway, it was a one-nighter, of course. We snuck it in in between moving and the family reunion. It would have been great except.... it was a cold day! It was only like 75* when we got there at about 4:00pm, and about an hour into our setting up it started to rain! It rained for the next 3 hours! So pretty much the whole time we were trying to cook and eat dinner. And the temperature dropped a good 20 degrees, too. So, that wasn't a very fun start! It was ok though, Ashlyn was having a blast, and as long as someone was holding him Elan was cool too. 

Obviously we took this right after we got there--before the fun weather and freezing cold!

I'm not sure what's going on here but just another typical picture of my child. 

So not long after the rain had really set in and we were trying to figure out how to get the hotdogs cooked and get our starving daughter fed, she added to the excitement by scratching her face pretty decent with a big stick. Tears, tears, and then a bandaid made it all fine. Such an awesome place for a bandaid.

Dinner cooking. Looks like fun, huh!

It finally stopped raining a little before we went to bed so we got to have some fun throwing rocks into the creek (well, guess which one of us really loved doing that! :) ) It was tricky navigating how to get us all to sleep in our tent. I had already put Elan down for sleeping in the back of the car a couple hours before, and it was so cold I was worried about where he was going to sleep in the tent. Plus we had planned for Lucy to sleep either in the car or in her crate outside our tent (where she usually sleeps when we camp), but we knew it would get way too cold for either of those for her that night, so....great. Dog in the tent too! Something else awesome that happened was that when we got into the tent that night our air mattress had gone completely flat! boo! So Collin and I got to sleep on the nice, hard ground. I didn't think it would be so bad because I was really tired, but it was uncomfortable enough that I felt like I laid awake all night. 

I first put Elan in his little camping bassinett to sleep, but he woke up and cried around midnight and I got so worried he was freezing I just stuck him in my sleeping bag. So then I was both uncomfortable on the hard ground and constantly worrying that he'd somehow suffocate under the sleeping bag. I was super cold even under the thick sleeping bag and quilts, which added to my sleeplessness. Finally at some point Lucy climbed out of Collin's side of the sleeping bag (he was actually the one who insisted that she sleep in the tent because it would be too cold in the car, therefore I said the condition was that she sleep on his side of the bag) and laid on top of my feet. That warmed me up! So then I was glad she was in there! 

Just as I was finally feeling warm and drifting off to sleep, around 2:30am, Ashlyn woke up and needed to go to the bathroom. Of. course. Never on a camping trip and hardly ever at all does she do that, but this night, with the 30 degree temperature, she needed to! After we got back from that, I think I might have slept a little. It was really wicked cold. I felt like I was awake all night, and then once I finally started to feel like I wanted to keep sleeping, the kids were awake! Murphy's law! Oh well, that's why we only go camping one night at a time, right!!!

It was so, so cold outside in the morning! 30 degrees! That's cold for camping, and way cold for camping with a kid and a baby! Once I got up and out of my sleeping bag, I took Ashlyn and Elan to the car and we sat in it with the heater turned way up for an hour and a half! Collin cooked us pancakes and brought them to us to eat in the car! What a wonderful guy. Once the sun finally came up high enough to hit us it warmed up a lot and we were fine.  And that is the tale of our little camping trip. Elan's first one!