We went camping

And we had a fun time! I don't have any pictures from Friday night but it was close to dark when we got there, and time was of the essence for tent set-up and dinner prep. Everyone slept great; what's more fun than sleeping in a tent? We were cozy and warm and moderately comfortable. The kids woke up around 6:45am, which isn't much different than at home. So here are some pictures from Saturday:

Breakfast: pancakes, fruit salad (in the cookie dough container), hot chocolate, orange juice.

I forgot the griddle. Luckily I had brought this pan to heat water for the hot chocolate, and it kind of worked okay for pancakes. After the first 3 or 4 they started to turn out pretty good!

One certain sweet child o' mine bumped the water cooler, sending my Ziploc-bag-full-o-pancake-batter onto the dirt. We lost a good-sized blob of batter, but fortunately I had prepared plenty. And, I'm 95% sure that nobody ate any dirt or rocks in the ensuing pancakes.

We took a hike along a pretty little stream. Doesn't it look so very lovely? The weather could not have been more perfect; not too cold for us desert-dwellers and a nice reprieve from the rapidly-rising Valley temps... it has officially reached 100 degrees here at home.

We stopped to look at a baby ladybug on a blade of grass, spotted by Noah's eagle eyes.

We also took turns trying to hit a rock with the pellet gun, we saw robins and bluebirds, lizards, a rabbit, and lots of deer and elk tracks along the stream.

There were a few minor obstacles, such as the fact that there were NO FIRES ALLOWED which we didn't know ahead of time. This meant NOT cooking the hotdogs over a fire as planned, but luckily I had brought the hot chocolate water-heating pan (pictured above) so we could boil them. Man that saucepan came in handy! We cancelled the s'mores-making but the kids did eat plenty of other treats.

We tried to make this campout extra fun for the kids since they earned it -- each of them had been saving up their "coins" for this trip and they each paid us 5 reds (we've changed a few of the prize amounts). I think it's cute that every one of them wanted to save up for camping instead of blowing their coins on things like ice cream; only Zoe once requested a trip to Dairy Queen with me, a couple months ago, so she has fewer total than the other kids but still enough for camping. Obviously it made more sense to go all together as a family instead of one by one. So since this was their "earned" campout, I insisted on feeding them pancakes (instead of cereal), we stayed extra long on Saturday (they had lots of fun on our hike, also playing in the tent, and playing hide-and-seek amongst the trees), we stopped by a fish hatchery on the way home just because they wanted to, and once we got home and unloaded the car we all went straight out to the pool (after changing into swimsuits of course). A fun time!

Noah announced on our way home, "This was one of the BEST campouts I've ever had!!" to which his sisters agreed. And Zoe said at least 5 times in the car on the way home, "Raise your hand if you had fun camping!!"

So I think it was a success.