What a Fun Week

Okay, this is going to be a long, jam-packed post, but it will be a good one!
To start our week off last week, in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, we decided to have an "out of this world" dinner. My aunt had sent me a link to this post and we altered it just a little to make it yummier for our family. Plus, using meatballs only made more sense in my book! So we had alien meatballs, green beans with alien almond eyes, and black hole garlic toast. Yeah it may have been a bit of a stretch, but the kids had a great time making the meatballs and had fun talking about man walking on the moon and what they would like to do on the moon. Then, Owen continued his fashion trend even after my having a heart-to-heart talk with him about four-year-old fashion do's and dont's. This is how he left the house the day after his fashion experiment: He reasoned that they were at least the same color and no one would be able to tell the difference. He had worn a matching set earlier and one of the flip flops had rubbed a blister on the inside of his toes, so he switched that one flip flop for the other set's. Apparently, the other set wasn't going to rub the blister as well.

Then, on the 21st (Emmett's 6 month birthday, by the way) we took him to the doctor to get his shots. Yeah, not such a great un-birthday present, huh? He took them in stride like he does everything else in life, and the next morning he woke up with his very first bruise! It's not one of those milestones they have a spot for in the baby book, but a worthy milestone all the less! He got two shots in each drumstick, I mean thigh, but only this one left a bruise.And then on the 23rd, Thursday, we were getting ready to leave on our family camping trip for the summer when Emmett had himself a nice blow out. In a white outfit. Of course. As I am rolling my eyes and thinking, "sure it had to happen this way, it is a white outfit that is now drenched in baby mustard, and I don't have time to run it through a full wash/dry cycle" I see Scott go grab the camera with a smile on his face and take a picture of Emmett's most recent blow out. Ew, gross, right?! Scott says he wanted to take a picture of it to give to a friend of his who is getting ready to have their first baby and show him some of the fun he has in store. I think that is just cruel! He also said now we have a blackmail picture to use on Emmett when he is a teenager... who wants to see themselves sitting in a leaky pile of poo?!

After everything (and everyone) was cleaned, we headed off to our campsite. We hadn't told the kids anything about where we were going or who we were going with or how long we were staying, so they were really excited. We love camping, and when we go, I grab sleeping bags for the kids and then take Teagan's mattress off her bed, and that is what Scottie and I sleep on. So when the kids saw the mattress going in the car, they knew we were camping somewhere!

We were headed up to Flaming Gorge to stay for four days. (Isn't that a pretty picture of it? You can see where it got its name from!)The drive up there took us about 4 hours, but we were able to make it all the way there on CNG (Compressed Natural Gas), so it only cost us about $11 in gas to get there!! Along the way, somewhere in the outskirts of Utah, a bull moose and his cow ran across the street in front of us! It was the first time I had ever seen real, live moose! How cool was that?! And when we finally arrived to check in to our site, right there at the welcome station was a herd of Pronghorns! Owen wanted to pet them and tried to sneak up on them with a clump of grass in his hands ready to feed whoever he could. The herd had settled down in this campsite to raise their nursery for the year. The one's Owen was trying feed were a mommy and her twins. They ended up all wandering away from him, but it was a great way to start a camping trip! For the rest of the trip, we would see pronghorns all over camp wherever we went... very cool!

The first night there we set up camp and Scott dropped a crawdad trap in the water to see if he could catch anything. The next morning we woke up and the first thing the boys wanted to do was to check the trap. Which wasn't easy, for even though our site backed up to the edge of the lake, there was about a 40' hill separating the two! The side he took down to the water's edge wasn't as bad the edge in the picture, but it was still enough to make him come off the hill very winded! This is the view from our picnic area. So Daddy trudged down the hill as we all anxiously ate our breakfast and waited for him to return. When he did, he was carrying a trap with 6 crawdads in it! Oh happy day! The kids were all ecstatic! Owen was the first to be brave enough to hold one, but after that, everyone wanted to touch our new pets. Scott let the kids play with them for a bit, and then put them in a bowl of icy water to comatose them until we could cook them later that night. (The kids thought that was really neat, and then when the water started to warm back up again, it was great fun to see them reanimate themselves once more.)By this time our other family members had met us there and we headed off to spend the rest of the day on a pontoon boat. Scott was worried about me taking my camera on the boat, so he convinced me to leave it at camp...wrong idea! There were so many great picture taking ops, I wish I had brought it along with us. Oh, well. I will have to scrounge some pic from my sister-in-law, I suppose! We cooked the crawdads in a pot water with some garlic cloves and some garlic salt, and when they were done they smelled delicious and were a beautifl red color looking like am miniature lobster! We had them along with our amazing steak dinner for a one of a kind camping, steak and seafood plate. There were 13 of us in camp, but some how we still had 3 left-over crawdads... I don't think many people were too excited to actually eat them after all!

Okay, that brings us up to Saturday, the 24th. It is now way past bed time, so I will post the second half tomorrow after some well deserved sleep... the aftermath of unpacking from a vacation almost negates any positives that came from the vacation, doesn't it?!