May

My kids and Richard gave me a sweet surprise on Mother's Day morning! Marianne put together the bouquet of fruit. (She got the idea from the Friend magazine.)  

Not everyone gets to be a mother in this life, and especially not to five really wonderful kids. I am one lucky lady. 

Sarah in the "Pirates of Grammar Island" play at school. 

We held a recital for all of our students at the end of the school year. We made sure our kids all performed in it as well. Here is Sarah with her teacher, Annie. We didn't think to take pictures of the other kids with their teachers because...well, their teachers are Richard and I. Either that just seemed boring, or I was too busy with the refreshments to think about it. Probably the latter. They all played great, however!

Richard was just itching to go camping for the first time this summer, so just after school got out we headed to Green Canyon. We figured the kids would enjoy swimming at the pool, so we surprised them. They didn't know where we were going until we got there. Well, although Green Canyon had started swimming lessons, the campground hadn't really been opened to the public yet...er...the public hadn't started arriving to use the campsites at this point so Green Canyon wasn't quite prepared for us. But, they were as accommodating as possible. The owner let us use his small beat-up fire pit because they hadn't put out the real ones yet...etc. 

I guess one of the perks of arriving a little early in the season was the fact that we were the only ones around. We sort of had the place to ourselves. 

Richard and the boys thought it would be cool to start a fire (built with crappy violin scraps - no less) with a magnifying glass. I think they made a black spot on the wood, but that was as far as they got before giving up and starting it the traditional way. 

Marianne hates this picture, but I assured her that no one looks at this blog anyway, so she didn't need to worry about my posting it. ;) I think it's a cute picture of her chilling out at the campsite.

I guess that's the difference between boys and girls. A boy (James, for example) will TRY to make himself look weird in a picture and then find it absolutely hilarious. 

Dinner! A few of the kids roasted hot dogs while the rest of us enjoyed some tin foil dinners. I was paranoid that they wouldn't be salty enough, so they ended up a little too salty. I guess I still have yet to perfect them...

Marianne had the idea to make banana boats. And, again I prove my point about boys. 

The boys had fun destroying a crappy violin with their pellet gun, BB-gun and blow guns. 

As it got darker, it got colder. But, we didn't let that ruin our fun. We played a game of Mad Gab in the tent before calling it a night.

It was a loooong night. So COLD! None of us slept very well. In the morning, Richard got up to get a fire going. He thought he would just warm up in the pick-up, but realized he had locked his keys in it. :O I don't usually haul my keys around with me when he is doing the driving, but we were SO LUCKY that I actually had them in the tent! We ended up taking a little drive in the pick-up once we all woke up. We needed to get gas, so we just kept driving until we got to a gas station that was open...in REXBURG! Since we were already there, we stopped at home to use the bathroom and then headed back to camp. It was a nice, warm drive and allowed us to thaw out a bit. After we got back to Green Canyon, we swam for a few hours while Richard stayed back at camp to do most of the packing up himself. Swimming lessons had ended for the morning and we basically had the pool to ourselves!

Anyway, you can kind of grasp how cold it got by the picture below. We had to defrost the pick-up! There was also frost on the tents, chairs, everything. . .

which may have explained why we were the only ones there!