MIA

For those of my many loyal readers (seriously kidding here) who have been wondering where I have been for the last three weeks, I am back!!! I have been to a family reunion in Arizona, scaled a cliff in New Mexico and spent many a days without a shower as I camped!! I have so many pictures to go through and post about, my intention is to chronicle it day by day or event by event. This has become my family journal so bear with me while I get through them all.


To start off with I came to Idaho on June 23rd to pack up with my family for the trek to Arizona. The traveling party was myself and my 4 kids, my brother, his wife and his 5 kids, my older sister's older 3 kids and my other brother's 5 kids. My parents were also going down. The grand total was 17 kids and 5 adults. Kind of a scary ratio!! We were driving down in two large vans! I drove one and Aaron, my brother, drove the other one. My parents drove their fifth wheel trailer!! We left early on June 25th trying to make it to Layton, Utah the first night. To say the least it was going to be a LONG drive the first day!! As you can imagine with that many kids we had more than a few potty breaks. It didn't matter if we made everyone go when we stopped invariably someone would have to go again 20 minutes later. We could have seriously saved like 2 hours if we hadn't of stopped as often as we did. Sometimes it was in a rest stop, sometimes it was off the side of the rode!! Oh, the joys of driving long distances with children!! Miraculously we made it to Layton at about 8pm after driving 12-13 hours. We still had to check into the hotel and feed the masses. It was 10:30 before everyone was fed and in bed. We slept in our clothes because the work to unpack the crammed vans and then repack in the morning was not worth it. Little did I know that that would set a precedent for the rest of the trip. The hotel rooms also only had ONE King bed so I piled in with the older three kids and it was like sleeping with a bunch of octopuses!! Not one of my best nights sleep!!


We woke up the next morning to the horrific (sense the sarcasm please) news that Michael Jackson had passed away!! Don't get me wrong I like some of his songs, but I was not in love with him and didn't think he was a good example for my kids. As we were sitting in the dining area of the hotel eating our breakfast and watching the news Ayden pipes up and says..."Michael Jackson died, we don't care!!" I think he was just wishing he could watch cartoons, but it made me chuckle just the same!! After we ate our breakfast, we piled back into the cars and headed toward the next destination, which was Ramah, New Mexico!! It was to be another 12-13 hour drive!! The kids were being troopers and so far we had no major fights or quarrels!!

The ride was uneventful except for the road itself. My parent's poor trailer, it took a beating!! We drove through a lot of road construction and when we arrived at our destination we walked into the trailer and found that a glass bottle of vanilla had fallen out of a cupboard and shattered, a honey jar had catapulted to the front of the trailer and the cupboard had emptied it's contents back behind the tip-out!! We got to camp at dusk, and had to set up tents and also feed the kids, who were starving!! It quickly got dark and we didn't have the tents set up yet. My tent that I haven't used since I lived in Iowa didn't have a rain fly and the zipper was broken. So I ended up piling in with my brother and his family. We had no time to fix dinner so we ended up having cold cereal all squished into the trailer!!! After a real nutritious dinner all the girls headed to the potty and on the way back I happened to look up and I saw the most beautiful sky full of stars. It had been a LONG time since I had seen such a clear starry night. All the craziness of setting up camp seemed to fade as I looked at the beauty above us!!

My brother Aaron is wondering..."are we having fun yet?"

Do you think we could fit a few more bodies in here?!! We were thankful to have had the trailer or we would have been eating in the dark!!

Up next exciting Ramah!!!!