N8 and the 4 little backpackers!

Because the 4th of July fell on a Friday, N8's flex was on a Thursday. He decided to take the kids, all of the kids, on a little backpacking trip. They left Thursday about 1pm and headed toward Lone Pine to grab walk-in permits for the Cottonwood Lake trail. Luckily there were still 5 available for them.

Everyone carried a pack. Emma, Mo and Henry carried day packs that had their sleeping bag and water. Benjamin and N8 had backpacking packs, each with a 2 man tent, sleeping bag, food and other gear.

Apparently things got off to a rough start when Henry, who wanted to hike holding N8s hand threw off his balance and N8 got a good gash in his knee (luckily part of the great was a first-aid kit!).

Then the hike was on:

They hiked in 2 miles to the first stream crossing and made camp.

Dehydrated dinners of mac & cheese, lasagna and pasta were for dinner:

N8, Emma and Henry stayed in one tent and Mo & Benjamin stayed in another:

In the morning they hiked another mile to "Secret Lake"-it's unnamed, so they called it "Secret Lake". The water is visibly quite low due to the drought this year:

The water is typically up to where grass is. The kids are standing in the lake!

It sounds like Henry did a great job, but was burned out on the hike back down. Benjamin carried his pack and N8 said he took babysteps most of the way. But he did it!!

They made it back home around 3pm and quickly showered and got gear put away!

I enjoyed shopping with my friend Megan at Walmart & Marshalls, then dinner at Bernadinos and a movie. I slept in this morning and then watched Austenland while a made a baby blanket for a baby shower this next week!

Escaping the heat...Furlough Fridays

So furloughs are in full swing. It's dumb, but rather than dwelling on the negative (loss of pay!!!) we are focusing on the positive-more family time!! So yesterday it was supposed to hit 109*. So we took the chance to drive up to higher elevation and escape the heat. We headed to Whitney Portal.

We spent the morning exploring the waterfall and the creek.

We had a little issue with them emptying the drop toilets and it being stinky, but we dealt with it.

After our picnic lunch N8 and the kids took off for Lone Pine lake (the first 3 miles of the Mt Whitney trail) while I enjoyed sitting by the creek, reading a book!

The kids all made it to the lake, a total of 6 miles there and back!

N8 carried Henry in the backpack, at the trailhead we had him weigh in- almost 45 pounds!

We finished off the day with Pizza at the Lone Pine Pizza Factory!

Next week (since every Friday is furloughed until the end of September) we're planning on going camping up North. We'll see how that goes!

Happy Long Weekend!

This past weekend was a 4 day weekend. N8 ended up spending Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon at a YSA (young single adult) activity down in he Big Bear area since he is the High Council Rep for the YSA. I made sure he wore his "My Wife Rocks" Tshirt so there was no confusion that he as a YSA!

Here on the homefront, we had some friends (Megan, her sister, Danie & Katie) over for pizza and a movie. The kids had a great time and it helped the evening pass by with fun!

On Monday we decided to take the kids on a little hike. Emma really was wanting a friend to come and play so we took her friend Kirsten along on the hike with us. It was a beautiful day and we were able to do some small video clips to make a commercial for the upcoming Blue & Gold Cub Scout Banquet. All in all a great long weekend. We'll see what happens with the Sequestration. Maybe we'll be having a lot more long weekends for a while!

A quick Schouten visit....

This past weekend my sister's family came for a quick visit. They had spent the week at Disneyland and came up here for the weekend. It had been several years since they had been here and they had never really done anything in our surrounding area when they had been here. We were excited to take them on some of our hikes and check out the area. They got here on Friday afternoon and we knew our time was limited. The forecast was predicting a 90% chance of rain for Saturday and the wind was already starting to pick up bringing in the storm.

So, we headed out to Fossil Falls. There are no fossils at fossil falls, it's the falls that are fossilized! It's a lava flow that water has etched out fun crevices, holes and an interesting little canyons. Their family really enjoying finding geocaches and luckily there were a few in the area!

It's a wonderful place to get some fun pictures!

Here's Jim with the cache!

Our token group shot taken with the timer on the camera!!

Jim had been given a "water" type gun that everyone had fun shooting:

 

N8 and the kids also found a large lizard, here's it's tail:

 

Saturday started out with a trip to urgent care for a sinus infection for Emma. Then the rain started. So we spent a bit of the day playing the Wii, going to a furniture store, playing games and going to the movies (We saw the Secret world of Arriety, it was cute!). By the time the movie got out the rain had cleared a bit (but the wind was still here) and N8, Jim and Bud headed out to find a few more geocaches while the rest of us tested our skills on Wii Resorts and Wii Fit +. We went to some Mexican for dinner and played games and the kids watched a movie in the evening. 

It was a great visit even with the rain. We love having visitors and look forward to our next one!!

Time...

Even though this hasn't been a flex weekend it has been (so far) one of the more pleasant and calmer weekends we've had in a LONG time! It seem to be rare that we have TIME! There are always meetings, activities, etc, etc. It's been super nice. Now we do still have Sunday and Monday ( :) for getting MLK off work and school!) but so far so good.
Last night we had two families over and we had pizza, visited and played games. We didn't play our typical Settlers or even Ticket to Ride. The kids played some Wii (they love Wii Sports Resort) and the big hit for the kids was Plants VS Zombies! At one point a different child was playing on each of our 3 computers!

Then some of the big kids played some Mario Kart :)

We have really had fun with the Wii! We hadn't had people over for quite a while and it was nice to sit and visiting, laugh and enjoy the evening.
The added bonus was that Henry actually slept pretty decent last night as well! That meant a nice evening followed by a nice night!
Today was a beautiful day and N8 decided we all needed to go for a little hike. This was Henry's first hike.

He really enjoyed it!
We passed a track that looked interesting. Probably a dog, but it was fun to tell the kids it might be a cougar!

Here they are at the top of the Mountain, I mean hill!

We were on the hunt for a geocache and Emma was the winner, she found the box!


Taking a rest on some rocks:

We came home a washed the van inside and out and tonight we watched Despicable Me (cute movie!). I can only hope that tomorrow and Monday will be as pleasant!