License to Drive

Look out world, look who got their driver's license on Tuesday....despite my best efforts to keep him my little Will, he went and passed his driver's test.  Then he gave me two coronaries on the drive home, when he ran through two stop signs. Ugh.  This parenting things just gets harder and harder!

On Friday, he will be driving himself to work for the first time as well.  That's right, Mr. Will is gainfully employed these days.  He has joined the ranks of fast food workers of America.  His second day on the job,  he came home and said he had decided he was actually going to study and get good grades this year in school, because working fast food sucks. Can't argue with him there, but hey it pays the bills, right?

Speaking of which, I better go call the insurance company and see what the current rate is for a teenage boy....

Camping Out

Oh August, we barely knew ye.

We had great plans for you, but then it rained nearly all month long.  And we wondered if we had somehow skipped the month of August and gone straight to  September. We did manage to fit in a few good times though....like camping!  Kids have been begging to go camping since 2010.

Ah, the joys of camping, especially for the first time in FIVE years.  It is truly amazing how much less work it is to camp when all your kids are five years older than the last time you went.   Suddenly now, they are old enough, big enough and smart enough to pitch tents, build fires and haul all the heavy stuff.  Leaving me plenty of time to sit by the fire and recover from watching them do all that work.

We spent the weekend at Willard Bay, which was about as far away as we could afford to go.  Still just as much fun though.  Also, only minutes away from gas stations and Walmarts, where we seemed to spend a good amount of time purchasing things like swimming suits, ice and cold drinks.  Not the kind of camping trip we ususally do, but fun just the same. Olivia especially enjoyed herself.  I think she spent seven hours straight in the water on the second day we were there.

This is how we take care of the trees in our yard that die.  They become fire wood.  Best fire we ever had.

We also tried a couple new things this year.  We did tin foil dinners with hamburger, carrots, potatos, mushroom soup, and zucchini.  It came out tasting exactly like pot roast. So yummy.  Next time I need to try stew meat.  Also, we had baked apples foil dinner style, and they were so tasty.  We just sliced up some apples with brown sugar and cinnamon, wrapped them in foil and threw them in the coals.  Just like pie only without the crust.  We even brough whipped cream to go with them, which was a nice little appetizer for our real dessert of smores, of course.

We so lucked out weather wise.  It rained the day before we went, and we almost postponed for a week.  It's good we didn't because it absolutely poured rain the next weekend, while the weekend we went was perfect.  Hot, no wind, no clouds.

Piper is not a water dog.  We discovered that she will swim for cheeze-its however.  That dog will eat anything. Including push pins, Dasani water drops, printer cartridges, swimsuits,  underwear,shoes, broccoli, peppers, watermelon, tomatoes- we have yet to find a food she won't eat.  There are very little non food items she won't eat as well. 

Olivia is most definitely some type of water creature, following in the footsteps of her sister.  Liv was the only one of us that did not get sunburned, because she was submerged in water 9/10ths of the time.

Audrey ended  her camp experience by getting her hair stuck in the tent zipper.  That was kind of funny.  Then when we were taking tents down, one of the spring bars on our big tent broke.  That was kind of not funny, but at least it happened at the end of the trip and not at the beginning.

The last day of the trip, Dan and Duncan had had enough and Will was not feeling good, so the boys left us there and went home while us girls hung out at the beach for one more glorious day.  Me and Livvi could have stayed til sunset, but poor sunburned Audrey was ready to call it a day by late afternoon.

We have been back home to real life for  a couple weeks now, but with a little luck we can pull off one more camp trip before the snow flies.