Mother's Day Weekend

 Our now-13-year-old tradition (with only a couple of misses) is to go camping on Mother's Day weekend.  I thoroughly enjoy the time of unplugging and re-connecting as a family.  As soon as I returned from Syd's graduation on Saturday morning, we headed to Douglas State Fishing Lake (better known as "New Baldwin Lake") to begin.  Russ and Calvin had gone out earlier in the morning to get our tent set up because it's first-come, first-served on the campsites.  They got us a great one!

As soon as we were settled, we took off on a hike, where we discovered a fun covered bridge.

Other than hiking, our afternoon entertainment included watching Calvin paddle himself around the lake on one of our twin size air mattresses.  Yes, you read that correctly.  It was a beautiful day and we didn't have any sort of boat, so Calvin asked if he could use one of the air mattresses as a boat.  I didn't think he was serious until he was off and floating!

He did a small "test run" to make sure everything worked okay, and then Russ took him to the opposite side of the lake for a longer voyage.  That kid cracks me up.  Look closely in this picture and you'll see our explorer coming.

We usually do trail suppers for our camping dinners, but we didn't have time to go to the store to get the supplies, so we improvised.  Baldwin Pizza Hut was only a couple minutes away, and while pizza is nowhere near as good as trail suppers, we'll get our trail suppers when we go camping on our big vacation in a month.  While the boys went to pick up dinner, Evie and I read a couple chapters in our latest book, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader."

After dinner, we headed out on the pier to fish and skip some rocks.

We had a nice view of our campsite from the pier.

What a perfect evening!

We went back to the campsite got the fire ready for s'mores.  So relaxing!

The only problem is we forgot our roasting sticks.  Russ and Calvin came up with a heavy-duty option using a huge tree limb, and a light-weight option using bamboo skewers duct-taped together.  Both actually worked just fine.

And the s'mores were definitely Evie-approved.

We decided to camp at New Baldwin Lake, first because we'd never camped there before, and second, because there was a chance of storms and we didn't want to be too far from home.  As it turned out, that was a good decision.  We didn't have phone service, so couldn't check the radar, but a little after midnight the wind picked up and the lightning show was quite impressive in the sky.  We decided it would be safest to pack up and head home.  We barely made it home when the downpour began, including hail and damaging winds.  I was very thankful to be in my house and not in a tent!  We had a perfect day and evening "camping" though, and for that, I'm very thankful!

My actual Mother's Day began when we picked up Violet from Grandma Cheryl's (because we all know she really hates camping) and she had made me a card and some mints.  Thanks, Vi!

Then my church kids (aka my 4th/5th grade Sunday School class) made me so proud when they recited the Books of the Bible in front of our church family.  They've been working on this all year and did such a great job! I'm really going to miss my 5th graders when they move up to the middle school group next year :(

In Youth Group, the boys decorated flower pots and I was the lucky recipient of this "#1 Mom"  pot with a beautiful geranium planted inside.

I truly believe I'm the luckiest mom in the world with these 4 incredible and unique humans God has blessed me with.  I'm so, so thankful that they call me "Mom."