It continues to snow in our canyon, so we've been planning to go out west to the desert (Fruita, Co) for our first camping trip when the chance came, which was this past weekend. It didn't turn out to be the greatest trip, unfortunately. I woke up with a sore throat on Friday morning and that made me pretty grumpy. Ben and Oliver both had really runny noses, so I guess we all had the latest daycare virus. In addition, Ben had some spectacular stomach virus that was not easy to deal with at a campsite, poor thing.
When Ben was in his second summer (age 14-19 months, I guess), if he was fussy at home, he would become instantly happy when we arrived at a campsite. We hoped Oliver would be the same and stop crying so much. He didn't really, so part of the weekend was just a bit miserable: Oliver crying to be held, Ben refusing to wear sunscreen or a hat, Oliver refusing to wear a hat, me coughing and sniffling, all three of us using thousands of kleenexes, dinner getting pretty much ruined on the campfire, cleaning up various bodily fluids with no sink and soap, Oliver scooping dirt with a stick and putting it in his mouth over and over and then crying about how bad it tastes, Ben stepping on a cactus and getting lots of spines in his foot (and actually handling it pretty well after a little cry) and Ben begging us over and over and over to come into his tent with him (I think since he didn't feel good he just wanted to hang out in his tent).
We debated coming home early, but asked Ben what he wanted to do and he said he wanted to camp another night. So we stayed Saturday night too and Sunday got decidedly better. We left early Sunday and went to a playground and had lunch and had ice cream and stopped to play in the Colorado river. Then Ben said he wanted to go to one more playground, so we stopped at a marvelous playground in Georgetown and had a great time and then had pizza at BeauJo's. If you tell Ben we have to leave soon he says "Let's stay TWO minutes!" and he holds up 10 fingers. Then he says "Don't count, Mama!" Then when we say it is time to go, he usually just says OK and comes along. He left the playground with a smile on his face - what a sweet boy! Oliver climbed to the top of the slide several times and almost went down the slide by himself. He actually was about to hurtle himself down the slide. And then our pizza order got lost so it took twice as long to get our pizza to us and both boys were just amazingly well-behaved and patient. What sweeties!
Tim uploaded some camping photos in the previous post - I will try to label them soon.
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