(I can hear the collective "YAY" now. hehe)
Day Four
I find it amazing how all my little sleepy heads seem to wake up much quicker out here in the fresh air. Oh, there are grumbles coming from the big kids' tent. There are few, "Josh!! Stop it!"'s being growled out. I even heard Sammantha do her, 'I am not ready to get up and if you talk to me or touch me again, I am going to have to go all drama queen on you' grunts and growls. But once their little faces emerge from the tent, it is only a matter of moments before there is a smile and some silliness. Now if only we could get some coffee going to help out ol' Mom and Dad.
Breakfast was uneventful. We drew cards to see who was doing the dishes. (We started this yesterday, cause the kids have a habit of disappearing the second a meal is done). High card washes, low card dries. It's a good system. Great actually, I havent had to do dishes since we started. Poor Sammantha has had to do dishes everytime so far. Her smile seems to have faded. With her luck at drawing cards she'll either be quite a card shark, or she will hate gambling and see it as a bad experience always. Well, she and Josh did their dishes and were done within two minutes. So we packed up, and headed to the bottom of the hiking trail.
We have one of those strollers with the really big wheels, for jogging, or going on trails and such. Darin wants to carry Victoria the whole time, but I know that won't go well. She will squirm and want down. So I convince him, that the whole reason we wanted this kind of stroller was for this very type of thing. So Darin is pushing and maneuvering a stoller through the trail. It was a fairly easy hike. Only 100ft of elevation change. At one point though, we did decide to leave the main trail and head down to the beach. We left the stoller and carried Vicki on down. It took us awhile, but we finally found a path down that was managable with a baby in your arms. We must have spent an hour turning rocks on the beach, watching the crabs run for cover. We found tons of starfish and hermit crabs. A few things that we were unable to identify and a couple of rock caves that we decided against going into. (Very wet and slippery)
So back to the main trail we go. We now have one pouting and miserable child who didnt get her own way following behind, crying and mumbling under her breath about how she never gets to do anything she wants to do, blah blah blah. We paused for a parental guidance moment, then continued on our way. We made our way down to a sand bar and we wrote all our names on the beach. I also discovered some sort of disgusting parasite thing on my head and started freaking about tics and such. Darin checked and there were no more blood sucking parasites on my head. And further investigation uncovered that it was a sand flea on my head. Yup, it bit me. STUPID FLEAS. Have I mentioned how I hate sand fleas? I have had the creepy crawly's ever since. YUK!
So we finally make our way back, with a few humorous moments of Darin cussing out our stroller as he maneuvered it along, back up the 100 ft elevation change. As we pack the stroller and kids back into the van, it begins to rain. Not torential down pour or anything, just a few drops.
We have lunch and I send the girls to nap with Vicki. They are looking a little shadowy around the eyes. So the 3 of them head into our tent. Darin and I did the lunch dishes. (Yup, we drew the cards) Then Darin, Josh and I went down to the beach to play some frisbee. We end up throwing rocks at floating driftwood instead. Darin sure has good aim. As we are playing around on the beach, Josh notices that my hair is now all standing on end. There is an electrical storm brewing and the electricity in the air has me doing an unwilling imitation of a porcupine. Everyone else seems to be vacating. Josh is getting nervous. Worried we will be struck by lightning. We head back to camp when even the hair on our arms was starting to stand. There never was any lightning. At least not in our vicinity. Sure felt like there would be though.
Darin, Josh and I played bocce ball in the rain. I even won a game. Wooo. Then decided to set up the tarp before the rain really started to come down. We searched for some fallen branches to fashion into poles, to no avail. We ended up stringing up our tarp under the trees beside our campsite. So we moved all our table stuff, and chairs under our tarp. The girls woke up to find all but our tents relocated into the woods. We cooked and ate dinner under there. we played games and watched as Victoria got filthy from being wet, then tripping into the dry dirt under our tarp and it all grinding right in. I couldnt wait for her bed time. Once she was settled in for the night, and the rain had mostly let up, we started a fire and had some more "schmoes". Lexi named our tarped area, "the happy place", as we had so much fun playing word games together under there. It was the most time we spent all together the whole trip. Who knows, maybe the rain was a blessing. It did bring our family all together under the tarp for 6 hours. And we had to be creative with entertainment, cause we didnt bring any board games or such. We played 'telephone' and "I went to the zoo and I saw a ...." and we made up our own version of Acrophobia .
Day Five
Packing up everything when it is wet is NOT fun. We decided to cancel our trip to Fort Casey and just packed and went home. The kids played travel bingo on the way, with Josh kicking butt. We stopped for dinner in Bellingham, cause a good hot meal that we didnt have to make sounded just sooooo good about then. We were very dirty from packing up all the wet stuff, but they let us eat anyway! hehe
It's good to be home. But the mountain of laundry (which added up to 11 loads in total) is scary but somehow comforting.
Now I have only two days to get all the laundry done, and get Sammantha packed to leave for Minnesota for the summer at her Mom's. =(
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