Away, Pt. II

Each night, we gathered ’round our fire and talked. Trenton took up telling us a series of stories titled, “When I Was a Little Boy.”
Danny would tell a story about when he was a little boy. Trenton would wait patiently for him to finish and then tell us his own story which was generally untrue, wacky, hilarious, and involved a lot of falling down.
Then Danny would tell another true story about when he was younger.
And Trenton would wait patiently for him to finish before starting in, “When I was a liddle boy…”
The trick was: we couldn’t get him to tell these stories while the sun was shining. He let me know, in no uncertain terms, that his Little Boy Stories were only to be told in the darkness of night.

Besides, who wants to listen to stories in the daylight when there’s cloud watching to be done?

Okay, one of those pictures is of a rainbow. You have to look REALLY close to see it.
And then there was the Supreme Cloud of Cowness… my son found it while he was fishing.
“Dat cloud is a cow, Mom,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, without turning around to look.
“Mom, LOOK at dat COW CLOUD.”
I thought he was just being a crazy kid. While we are driving, he’s always telling me how the clouds look like noses and bad guys, and I can usually get away with just saying, “Oh really? Cool.”
Not today. Probably because he was making a really good point.

Before tuning in to Trenton’s Nightly Story Series, we would make s’mores. The first night we didn’t have roasting sticks, so we wrapped them up in tin foil and threw them on the hot coals. It worked out really well -I think I actually prefer that method. The second night we had roasting sticks (compliments of the highly expensive country store down the road from the campsites).

The kids took some time to star gaze:

(Trenton hates the LED flash on my phone’s camera.)
And on our last morning, the kids had compassion on the myriad of washed up dead crawdads. I was glad. It was a fresh change from the cigarette bud counting they had been doing the day before.
“MOM! FOUR! FOUR CIGARETTES AND THAT MEANS SOMEONE WAS SMOKING AND SMOKING IS BAD FOR OUR BODIES!”
Well, it’s true.
My kids became professional crawdad hunters. They would find one (or pieces of one, either way the burying process worked wonders).
They would dig a very shallow hole and place the dead crawdad (or crawdad pieces) in it.
They would cover it with a rock and brush dirt over it to the best of their abilities.

We all returned to camp where the kids used tent poles to make “magic” tricks and my husband and I packed everything up.
It was a great trip. We were rained on everyday -but not to the extent that we had to hole up in our tent. Mostly, the rain just gave us pleasantly cool weather and a gorgeous cloud cover (mooooooo).
As we drove home, my husband pulled over on the side of the road to pick me a wild sunflower (my FAVORITE!) and the kids eventually fell fast asleep.

I made it home just in time to bounce in and our of the shower and make it to Primary.
I hope we can get away with just our little family more often… we never do. We always get away when it’s for something like a family outing with more than just “us.”
This last weekend make both my husband and I realize that WE need to make more time for our little family -and that time shouldn’t be in front of the TV (even though we all adore “Top Shot”).
I mean, if we hadn’t have gone camping we would have never known about Trenton’s past as a “little boy” and all of the monumental things he WENT THROUGH (hopping over fires, falling down four times, getting “fwee” scrapes that didn’t bleed but still had to be patched with band-aids).
I sure do love my family.
Good thing too because I’ve got one dirty house to muck up. Camping is not easy on the living room area -THAT’S for sure!

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