Long time no post

It's always hard when I don't post for a bit, because then I wonder how I can catch up. Well, I guess I can't. Maybe at some point I will put up some photos of the past month or so - or maybe not.

Anyway, the house has been quiet this week. D is in Colorado, with some students. He and they seem to be having a good time. They are enjoying MUCH cooler weather than we are. They had snow flurries - meanwhile we're having triple digit heat index days.

A is at Scout camp. I went out there tonight for parent's night and enjoyed pizza and desserts - what a healthy combo! At least I drank plenty of water (thanks to the heat index). A is doing fine and having fun. He doesn't seem overly bothered by the heat. He says the food is good - they cooked themselves spaghetti yesterday and hot dogs today for lunch. He is swimming at least once every day (swimming merit badge plus some free swim).

The Scouts were going to have ice cream after all the parents left, to help console the Scouts at their parents leaving. This is a slightly foreign concept to me - A is having a blast, he won't need consoling. One of the other parents said she had asked her son if he was homesick or crying and he said yes. It hadn't occurred to me before that to ask A, but then I did. A's response, "no, I'm not homesick, but I miss the computer".

A was happy to see me, and the stuff I brought: googles, spray sunscreen and a book. He'll be happy tonight eating ice cream with his friends too. And tomorrow doing his activities.

Meanwhile, back at the home front, M is hanging out in his room on the computer and reading. I'm trying to get him to tackle his summer work little by little, so it doesn't ruin his last week of summer. He misses his friends, but doesn't want to initiate any plans for getting together.

Me, I'm trying to tackle bits and pieces of things around the house and getting ready for our vacation. It sure is quiet.

Home again and back off

The busy life of a pre-teen.  I picked M up at school after his Space Camp trip.  I heard lots about it - fun stuff, riding simulators and such, staying up late.  I brought him home to drop off stuff and see the rest of the family, then he packed up the Wii and D took him down to church for the middle school lock-in.  Well, only the evening part of it.  After 2 late nights in a row, we decided he could stay up late, but not lock-in at the church all night.  The rest of the kids there (all girls tonight!) have probably not been up late the last few nights and will probably be up giggling most of the night.  I'm off to pick him up again now...

Childfree Night

Amazing - no kids for the night!  

M is off at Space Camp with about 40 other 6th graders from his school.  They left after lunch today and will return Friday evening, exhausted I'm sure.  And just in time for the lock-in at church...  We've pretty much decided he's not spending the night there, but if he's in not too tired, he can go all evening (the only other boy that usually shows up for the middle school church group isn't spending the night either).

A is off with my mom tonight.  She mentioned that perhaps he could sleep over sometime soon and he said "how 'bout tonight?"  So, he's off there.

And what are we doing with these lovely kid-free hours?  Each on a computer, par for the course if the kids were in bed.  But we have plans to go out to dinner tomorrow - somewhere non-M friendly.  Because D still has to go to work Friday, we probably won't go to any really interesting places (no place really interesting exists in this town), but there are places that are tasty and don't serve traditional kid fare.

Sticker? What sticker?

Another interesting visitor on our camping trip was the lovely "Stinky Sweatsock Casserole" sticker. It was just lovely to have along. M got it out of one of his magazines the day before our camping trip. M put it on someone, they put it elsewhere, etc.

Well, Saturday night before we went, M put it on my pillow just before he went to bed. When I discovered the sticker, I snuck into M's room and put it inside his suitcase. HA.

So, when M went to get something out of his suitcase Sunday night or Monday morning, he found the sticker. "Hey, who put this in here?"

And then he put it on someone else.

Of course the whole idea is to put it on someone without their being aware of the sticker. We all wore the sticker at various times - some of us longer than others.

Here M realizes that he's just been "stickered".


Here's A with the sticker, not realizing quite yet that he's been "stickered".


And M wanted to make sure there was a picture of me with the sticker. I realize that the only way you can tell its me is by the hair, but still, there I am with a sticker.


At one point, the sticker tore when D took it off his back. D then managed to put half each on M and A. A didn't realize it and wore his sticker on his back for several hours. If you didn't look closely, it just looked like a graphic on the back of his shirt.

I think the other half got thrown away.

M was always pretty good at noticing the sticker on himself right away, so I had to resort to other placements. On his pillow in the tent. On the bottom of his sleeping bag. And the last one, on the way home, inside the pillowcase on his pillow - not to be discovered until he went to bed here at home. I haven't seen the sticker since then, so maybe I got the last laugh. Or maybe I just haven't discovered the sticker's new home...

Wildlife

We saw various sorts of wildlife while we were in the Smokies.

Wild turkeys:


Deer. Lots and lots of deer.

We saw 2 deer in the campground the first evening, just 2 campsites over from us.

Then when we went on an evening hayride (in a flatbead 18 wheeler, or so it seemed), the person counting deer, supposedly counted 89. Wow. There were a LOT of deer, but I'm not sure there were really 89. 50 at least, though.

Squirrels aren't so odd to see, but this one came up really close. He stood right next to D's chair. If D had reached down, he could have touched the squirrel.


We even saw 2 bears - yearlings, we think. I took a picture, but can't for the life of me actually SEE any bears in the photo, so I won't post it here.

Good eating while camping

It was quite interesting getting ready for this camping trip. D and I discussed it as we pulled out the kitchen boxes - we think it was 3 years ago that we took all the kitchen gear on a camping trip. Wow. I can't believe it's been that long.

We've been camping plenty of times since then - just usually with the Scouts where they handle all the cooking needs. When we went camping this summer, we took a cooler and the marshmallow sticks (cooked the hotdogs on them for dinner one night too), but not the cooking boxes (we didn't have room for them in D's car). We've camping generally twice a year with the Scouts for going on 6 years now. And some years more often - though usually if they camp in the dead of winter I stay home to keep an eye on things. Yeah, right. I just don't like camping in freezing weather.

Anyhow, we decided to look for recipes for our dutch oven. We found a great one for lasagna. Only one problem - it feeds an army. This is after dishing out servings to each of us:

We did all go back and have seconds (the only other thing for dinner was bread, heated near the fire), but there was still a LOT of lasagna left! Enough that we all had it for dinner back here at home last night. And one serving that M had for lunch today.

We debated whether we could reheat the lasagna there at camp. We didn't end up trying to, but I think I will look into the idea. We all enjoyed the lasagna, but... there really was too much of it. I would definitely make it again if we had more people.

We made one other meal in the dutch oven - German pancake. Yum. D mixed up the batter here at home, so all he had to do in the morning was start the charcoal and cook the pancake. The recipe calls for dusting it with powdered sugar, but we hadn't brought any, so oops. I had thrown in some honey sticks at the last minute, so we each had a tube of honey on our pancake. Quite tasty.

Other meals weren't quite so fancy. We cooked sausages over the fire one night. Followed, of course, by s'mores. Sandwiches for lunch each day. And a mish-mash of fruit, sweet breads, yogurt, oatmeal, cocoa, coffee and tea for breakfast.

More pictures from Webelos-ree

Saturday afternoon we heard that M and some of his friends had been up on top of the adirondack (sp?) shelter in the wee hours of the morning - something like 1:30 or 2am. So it wasn't too much of a surprise to find M sacked out at dinnertime:

He had heard that dinner was going to be chicken stir-fry, so he had loaded up on leftover breakfast food - fruit, bagels and cereal - and then sacked out on his sleeping bag. It turns out that the stir-fry was all in separate bins - one each of chicken, rice, peppers&onions, pineapple - so he could have had just chicken and rice, but by that point he was out cold. It took D several times to wake him up for campfire.

One of the things that they did at campfire was retire old flags. We cut up the flags at our campsite and each den got one flag. A was selected to carry one of the pieces of the Wolves flag:


Then he was selected again to be part of the color guard and take down the flags. I think for this part it was because he was the only Wolf in dress uniform.

They got a quickie lesson from the Boy Scouts on how to be a color guard and they did a good job. Very respectful and careful with the flag. Maybe they should have split up the 2 youngest kids, though - A and a 1st grader were trying to fold a flag. The other flags had 4th and 5th graders handling them.

Webelos-ree time again

That's right - it was time for the annual Webelos-ree again. Where we all go and camp with the Cub Scouts. Only this year, M is a Boy Scout - and has joined the Troop that puts on the Webelos-ree. So M got to work one of the activities. He thought his activity was the best (most fun) one there.

Here's M blowing up balloons for his "Remember the Alamo Balloon Pop".


Then they attached the balloons to their ankles with rubber bands, dividied the kids into 2 teams and had them run around trying to stomp each others balloons.


The kids all had fun and no one seemed to get upset when their balloons got popped and they were out of the game. And M thought that running that acitvity wasn't too bad. He did say that he got a bad taste in his mouth from blowing up balloons (though many of the adults blew up balloons for the kids in their groups also).

They did tomahawk throwing again this year and A was the only kid is his group to stick his tomahawk in the target. He did way better than I did - I tried 4 times and hit the target each time, but the closest I came was whacking off a chunk of the treelimb framework.

(No, I don't know why this picture is sideways when the balloon picture is properly upright. I may try to fix it, but then again, it may not happen.)

And, of course, we had to have a monkey bridge. The kids love this. They love it enough to spend an hour in line waiting to cross the monkey bridge. Meanwhile the adults were all resting at picnic tables in the shade because it was upper 80s out there with 90% humidity. Hot and sticky!

A had a GREAT time at camp!

D and M and I headed up to North GA Friday night, so we could be closer to camp Sat morning. It was a great idea - we had about a 45 min drive to camp instead of 2.5 hours. That's a lot of difference on a Sat morning when we needed to pick A up at 10 am. We camped at Unicoi State Park. It was really nice, but unfortunately you have to go through Helen to get there (or at least that's the easiest route) and Helen is a parking lot on the weekends.
We got to camp and got A. He was very happy to see us - and full of stories about how much fun camp was. He had lost a shirt and towel (exactly why I send old towels to camp), but we were able to find both in the enormous lost and found bin. He was particularly happy to find the shirt as it was one of his favorites. Oh, and when we picked him up, he was wearing the yellow shirt again. Same one as in several pictures from camp. Yes, this one:


This was Sat night eating s'mores back at our campsite.

A tells me that my guess of soccer at camp was partly right - it was 6 ball soccer. Sounds wild!

After getting A at camp we headed to Dahlonega, hoping to do a gold mine tour/panning for gold and then some tubing. All the driving around to get A from camp and then the saga of having to go back to our campsite to try to snag another night's reservation (bad us for waiting so late to make campsite reservations!), we only had time to do one thing. The kids chose tubing - so tubing it was. It was fun. The river (creek?) was a bit shallow in places so we had to push ourselves off rocks at various times. Rather different from previous tubing I've done where the river was more like knee to waist deep and with a faster current. Though with the rocks right near the surface, this had a little bit of rapids feel - but just enough to be fun. No pictures from tubing - not going to take the camera tubing with me...

A at Camp Mikell

Here is A with a group of boys. I'm guessing this is the boys in his cabin. A is front row, on the left - holding a yellow shirt and a can of soda in front of his face.


A playing soccer perhaps? Though that doesn't look like a traditional soccer ball.


The above 2 pictures were taken on Wed, according to iPhoto. And the one below on Thur. Note, though, the shirt is the same. I have a feeling A is going to come home with a fair amount of clean laundry....



I did see one later photo where he is wearing a different shirt. So he is changing sometimes... And it may be that the dates on the photos are not quite right.

A goes to camp

A break in my vacation reporting to bring you up to speed on what else is happening in our lives....

We got home Thursday night. I did several loads of laundry on Friday, getting ready to get A packed to head off to camp today, Sunday. We drove him up to Camp Mikell this afternoon and dropped him off. I can't believe my baby is off for a whole week of sleepaway camp. It doesn't faze him in the slightest. He was all excited to go and do all the fun camp type stuff - tye-dying, swimming, hiking, etc. Several of the counselors remembered him from his being there with my mom the last 2 years. But this time, he's on his own. I know he'll have a GREAT time! Now, I just need to write to him...

Meanwhile M has finally saved up enough money for that iPod he's been craving. He's ordered a 2GB silver, refurbished iPod from the Apple store. He can't wait for it to arrive!

Blogger has been giving me fits with uploading photos - sometimes it will do it beautifully, other times it will say "loading" for multiple hours and never do anything. Tonight its been working, but it's past my bedtime, so hopefully it will cooperate again tomorrow...