Courageous Joy

Weekend Recap

Yes, there is life - abundant life - without electronic toys. We had a great time. This was our first trip with only the younger 5 children. That was a bit strange the first day - but really turned out to be a good time of focusing on how much we have left to do as parents. Not sure that is coming out right. With the older ones starting to leave home, it's easy to begin to think we're in the "cruise to the finish line" stage of parenting.....but we still have lots of shepherding, mentoring, parenting left to do with the younger set. LOL

We fished. We geocached. We went to the zoo. We had two fires. We had s'mores once. We hiked. We fished. We read McManus. We played games. We caught grasshoppers and frogs. We talked.

Josiah and Jamin drove up on Sunday. What a treat. A great weekend.

This river ran behind our campsite. I called it the "brown river" after the Yellow River....the kids named it the Chocolate River - are they my kids or WHAT? They spent lots of time catching frogs and grasshoppers and throwing stones at this spot. Everyone helps set up camp...Combat fishing at it's best. Michael deserves an award. I took one look at this and jumped ship. I took this photo from safety.

The Grasshopper Trap - by Patrick McManusGeocaching - We found 5 out of 6...There had been recent floods...and most of the caches were IN the brush! Several times we let Michael go INTO the undergrowth and bring the cache out in order to avoid snakes. Yes, Arielle SAW a snake so we know they really do exist.

Doesn't this scream SNAKES???? What does this say about me that I said, "Zander, I found it - want to get it? " ::snort::It says that I wouldn't want to rob my child of THIS sense of accomplishment. ::snort::

Somewhere on the long caching trek, Stacia discovered her BUTTONS...and spent quite a bit of time the rest of the day buttoning an unbuttoning her outfit. And then the camera died.....I do have a video of Stacia feeding the giraffes that I'll try to load later...and there are a zillion other photos, but I'm at 87% of my limit on blogger.

The weekend was wonderful. We missed the four older children, but we had a great time connecting with the younger five. I am refreshed! I needed to get away from all the "to do" lists, that I can't possibly keep up with, and simply BE A FAMILY. That is tough to do when you are a pastor's family....a bit easier when he was a junior chaplain and tougher again now that he has more responsibility at work. I'm so very glad that Michael wanted to buy a trailer....it certainly made camping in HOT TEMPS much more bearable....because we may have gone without electronic TOYS but you can bet your bippy I was running the AC and the freezer.

Lunch break is over...More later.