Bye bye Woyen

And so the time has come... Lauren spent an amazing year with us - she made our lives tolerable - enjoyable even. The kids loved her and even just today Gabrielle said to me: "Lauren is my babysitter but she belongs with our family, right?" Now what do you say to that? Thank you Lauren!

Breakfast portraits

Hiking at a toddler's pace

Drapereses gone wild!

How quickly annual traditions take hold - last year's camping trip having been relatively successful, we booked another camping trip this year with a large group of our friends and their children. I pride myself on being the type of person who makes every mistake ... once. I had believed (erroneously) that the hardest part of camping was the packing. And everyone knows (no, they don't, in fact) that packing for two nights of camping is essentially the same as packing for a week of camping, so why not go for a whole week?

It started out as usual - with Mark trying to fit everything into the limited square footage we had available, including a roof bag. Clearly, we were optimistic about the capacity of our station wagon - the pool noodles were on our priority "must have" list.

Below, our home for 6 nights. It was lovely, actually, right on a little dead river. All covered in algae but filled with frogs and watery creatures.

And below, Isaac's home for 6 days. He loved playing in the car, turning switches, and possibly also just avoiding mosquitoes. He spent, no joke, an hour a day in the car. By himself. Just sitting in there, turning switches. When we'd turn on the car, the heater would turn on full-blast, the sunroof open, radio blasting.

We managed to keep things interesting by renting a canoe one day, a kayak another, heading to the beach most days.

And we saw wildlife! Turtles!!

Ahhh.... bread with cream cheese and jam tastes sooooo much better in the great outdoors.

After a few days on our own, our friends started to arrive, and at one point there were approximately 14 kids (who could get them to sit still long enough to count them?) in our campground area, all of our sites reserved side-by-side. It was kind of fun letting G just wander from campsite to campsite - she really got into the independence by the end of it.

Here are Jim and his oldest, Liam, along with Isaac, doing his best Donny Osmond impression. Like seriously, where did all those teeth come from?

Just to get a sense of the general mayhem, there were kids and glowsticks everywhere.

Gabrielle, all paddled up.

It was great news when Dan and Amanda showed up with their kids, because G was a bit outnumbered by all the little boys running around, torturing frogs and anything else they could get their hands on. She and Naya immediately held hands and were best buds for the following 48 hours. Sisterhood, right on!

Just some of the kids at the jamboree.

So in conclusion, I can definitely state that the hardest part of camping is NOT packing, it's camping. Work work work...