2011 Colorado Camping

Have I mentioned how hot and dry it was this summer!  So when we went to Colorado where it was cool and rained every day, I don't think I'm exaggerating too much when I say it was refreshing to our mind, body, and soul.  These were some of my favorite memories from this year's trip.

SweetTate and Great-Granddaddy

SweetTate and his cousin spent so much time in the river, they were wet more than they were dry!  And loved every minute of it!

 My Dad and his brother cooking breakfast and swapping stories.

SMORES!!

Horseback riding...absolutely beautiful!  And one happy SweetDoll!

My Dad on the hunt!

This was our crew this year.  My kids had four of their great-grandparents here.  Pretty neat.

 Hike with Granny and Papaw around the lake.

SweetBoy thought there was gold in them thar hills!  No such luck!  Snap.

I loved this tree, but I thought this picture was especially cute with Grandma and Granddad enjoying its afternoon shade by the river.

Sighhh...makes me happy just thinking about it again.  :)

2011 Summer Rundown

It seems like ALL we did was baseball this summer, but when I was working on the summer scrapbook, I realized that we did squeeze in some other fun stuff.  Here are the hightlights:

SweetTate's birthday

We met Curious George.

SweetBoy's birthday.  Gotta love trick candles!

We saw Cars 2 at a drive-in!  (I thought that was so cool!)  It was our first time to a drive-in.  The drive-in promoted the movie by putting cars all around town with eyes in the windshields.  By the theater, they had several cars lined up there including "Frank."  I thought it was clever and cute!

Bowling...SweetTate got a strike and I asked him to show me that celebration again and this is what I got.  Such a ham!

Fourth of July with SweetHeart's family

Kid's nature hike at a state park

Trip to our favorite kids' hands-on center

Trip to cool Colorado where it rained every day!  That was so sweet!  We had the hottest, driest summer I have ever seen.  (I couldn't narrow the pictures down, so that will be the next post.)

SweetHeart's parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.  We had so much fun hosting a reception for them.  Here they are with their kids and grandkids.  So blessed!

Aaaah.  Then we had a little break before school started!

Camping 2010

It seems like I have said this a lot lately on here, but here is another one of my favorite places on earth.  For as long as I can remember we have gone camping in Colorado.  This year was a little different in several ways.  One was that we had to change campsites in the middle of our trip.  Now we have done that by choice before (I wouldn't recommend it) :) but this time they were closing the campground we were in for renovations.  Everything else was full and we had to wait for a newly renovated one to open to move into.  It was a little chaotic, but it worked out.  And it was different because we had a smaller group for a shorter time.  Here was the crew...my family, my parents, and both sets of my grandparents.  A pretty special group I must admit!

We did the usual things.  Fishing...these were near our first campsite.

Once we moved, the river was not as close, and we found other entertainment.  Thank God for grands and greats!  SweetTate and SweetDoll going on a "bear hunt" with Granny!

Cutting wood.  We missed Uncle Justin, but SweetBoy tried to step up and keep the firewood pile stocked.

Playing washers with Grandma and Granddad.

Leave it to Granddad to find a good stick to use for a bat and introduce the kids to "cone ball."  They had so much fun!  And we got tickled watching SweetTate run the bases hollering, "Papa, you got to tag me!"

Lucy took it all in stride!  This was her first camping trip and she did great!

The kids and I went on a hike from our campsite down to the river.  Up to the top of the mountain where they climbed on this huge boulder! Down to the river and back up to our campsite.  Why did we go all the way down and back up again?  SweetBoy was the leader!

Of course, we enjoyed the campfire after supper.  Oh, and that was different too.  Instead of cooking mostly over the fire, Daddy cooked in dutch ovens.  YUM!  We had gourmet camping this year!  Not to mention the gourmet camping kitchen.  Two burner campstove for heating water or cooking, a table top grill, two burners to cook with the washer lids on, AND a cook area for the dutch ovens.  Camping with my family is far from roughing it!  ...except for the whole running water thing! 

The first campsite is pretty dense trees, but this one gave us wide open spaces which was wonderful for star gazing!  The kids even saw the Milky Way for the first time!  I love it!  Like I said, one of my favorite places on earth!

Ballpark #4

SweetHeart and I have a goal of going to games in all of the major league ballparks.  We have been to the Pitsburg Pirates Three Rivers Stadium, the Seattle Mariners Safeco Field, the Texas Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, and now the Colorado Rockies Coors Field.  We were rooting for the home team, but they lost.  It might have been...the curse of the scorebook.  Dun-dun-dun

{That was supposed to be dramatic music.  Did you get it?}

Baseball is Sweetheart's thing.  When we started dating, I knew nothing about it.  So to learn the game, keep me focused on what was going on, and learn the lingo, SweetHeart taught me how to score a game.  I bought a scorebook and even have my baseball pencil sharpened and ready!  It has become a scrapbook of sorts--I staple our tickets on that game page.  (It has been interesting to see how the tickets have changed over the years.)  Anyway, for the last 10 years or so, I've scored at least one game a year (except the years I had an infant attached!)  We have seen more games than that, but the ones I choose to score it seems that our team loses!  We noticed this phenomenon recently and counted to just prove it.  Out of 18 games, there are only 7 winning games recorded in it!  We have considered retiring this scorebook and starting a new one!  We will if our team makes the playoffs, and it looks like they might have a shot this year!

While we were gone, Meme entertained the kids...or they entertained her!  Thanks, Meme!

Marathon post

The visions of doing a post everyday this week vanished, so here we go! 

• Birthday Boy!  SweetBoy made it to double digits!  I see more and more fingerprints of God on you, and I am so thankful He put you in our family!

• We had a family outing to Palo Duro Canyon.  It is one of my favorite places on earth.  Yes, I've been to the Grand Canyon, and the similarities end with the fact that they are both canyons.  The Grand Canyon is huge and majestic, but Palo Duro is more colorful and tangible.  We enjoyed hiking and a picnic.

• We went to see Toy Story 3.  You would think being a mother of three that I would have been crying at my children's childhood going way too fast.  But no, I cried often and it was triggered by memories of my CareBear Funshine and how lonely she must be up in my closet!  (When we played, she was a girl! Now I think the cartoons have him a boy.)  My brother had Grumpy, and Mom made them both for us.  We played and played with those dolls!  At my grandparents' home where we spent a lot of time in the summer we built a whole world for them--beds, flying cars, a slide, a swingset, a balancing beam...if we could imagine it, Papaw and Mema could help make it happen.  Even as I grew older, when my feelings got hurt, Funshine was the one I wanted to cuddle with for comfort.  I have let my kids see her, and play a little bit, but I was afraid they would tear her up, so she is back in the closet.  But she has been a very trusted and dear friend!  (I had a cute little picture to share, but I can't find it at the moment--maybe later.)
• Continuing the stroll down memory lane...SweetDoll and I went to a day camp at a campground I went to (another favorite place on earth).  I loved camp--everything about it!  Even the green eggs and ham...the cafeteria had green fiberglass skylights, so everything had a green tint to it.  I lived for it every summer!  I went to day camp 1-3rd grade, then all week camp 4-6th grade, sponsor's assistant in 7th grade, then a staffer 8-11th grade.  It is where I fell in love with sign language and met a friend who set me on a path to deaf education.  I've been down that camp road in a church van.  I drove down in my first car, a '79 Toyota Celica, the first weekend I had it and could not get it to go in reverse (it was a stick shift and I didn't have the hang of it yet)!  And now I have driven down that road in a minivan with my daughter.  Talk about coming full circle!  A lot of things have changed, as they should, and we had a great time!  A lady who was my leader at my church and then the camp director when I was a staffer happened to be there.  It made my day!  And it just wouldn't have been camp without her!

• The main event of the summer so far has been my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary.  It was a lot of preperation but so totally worth it.  I don't think we could have done anything to please or honor them more.  It was a treat to have all of that side of my family together. 

• Mom and I did a scrapbook that is one of the coolest books I've worked on!  As we worked on it, one of the things that stood out to me was their church friends.  Life-long friendships made stronger in the bond of Christ, they have served together, laughed together, raised their kids together, cried together, grown older together...  There was a picture of several of them (6-8 couples) who went on a mission trip together as young married people with young kids.  All but one couple came to the party and they took another picture together.  More than family, it was their friends who came to the party.  We have been a part of some neat groups in the churches we have been in and I have some life-long friends, but I don't think I will ever experience anything quite like that.
• In preparing for the party, we made cookies (instead of a cake).  I was making a batch of cookies ahead and the plan was to freeze them and then bake them closer to party time.  As I put the cookies on the cookie sheet into the freezer, SweetTate asked me, "Momma, is our oven broken?"  I laughed and reassured him that it was working fine.  We would bake them another day!
• The party landed on the 4th of July weekend, so we got to celebrate with family.  It has been years since we bought fireworks.  We are usually camping or it is too dry to even consider it, but this year we are enjoying lush green yards.  (Ok, lush may be pushing it, but for this part of the country it is lush!)  My brother, my cousins' husband, and SweetHeart went together and got fireworks.  They did a great job!  We had a blast!  I got to play with my camera a little and got some fun pictures of the kids with sparklers.  My brother got one of him writing out his name with a big circle around it.  It was cool!

• Cousins.  Enough said!

• Our favorite baseball team has been doing great!  Then we make plans to go to 2 games and they lose!  Both of them!  But we had a fun time at the hotel swimming pool and watched the fireworks after the game.

I think that catches you up!  Hope you are enjoying your summer too!