That felt good!

I actually didn't work for 5 days! This was the first time in nearly 3 years that I really got away! I took 8 of the kids (Jeremy's in the Marines and stationed in Okinawa, and Jason works full time but couldn't take the time off, so he stayed home with Daryl who also couldn't take the time off now) and went camping!

We left suddenly on Sunday - we had planned to leave on Tuesday, but one look at the weather forecast showed me that earlier was better than later! So we quickly packed up and took off around noon. We got to camp around 7 pm and set up as quickly as we could.



We spent most of Monday running errands and washing clothes at the laundry mat - we left so suddenly there wasn't time to catch up on laundry (for some reason we always seem to have a lot of laundry to do around here ;) ).

That allowed us to have a great day on Tuesday (the best day of the week for beach fun)



- we did beach combing out on the spit - saw a couple of large star fish, one purple and one orange, and ton of anemones, mostly green and purple, more little crabs than you could ever count (yes, that's a brave mom (me) holding that crab - it did try to pinch me, but I learned young how to hold a crab!) and the highlight of the day - a sea otter (the pictures didn't turn out, bummer!)! It even climbed up on the rocks to eat a fish and stare at us!~ It was sooooo cool!



Then after lunch we went to the sandy part of the beach and the kids got to play in the waves and in the fresh water creek and learn about "estuaries" and what makes them special!

They even got to help a few stranded fish (very tiny) from a tide pool that was rapidly evaporating and set them free in the ocean again!

That night my sister, Lisa, came out for the campfire and we got surprised by a very bold raccoon - we turned around and at first I thought it was a child, but it was a large raccoon standing on it's back legs! It wandered around and then climbed a nearby tree to watch us the rest of the evening!

Wednesday we got to spend some time at my mom's house - the kids love to play in Grandma's toy room. We also tried some new variations on Smores that night - one with chocolate frosting instead or or in addition to hershey's chocolate, and the other was adding peanut butter! Both were good - I preferred the peanut butter ones, but Jonathan thought the chocolate frosting with hershey's was the best!

Thursday was our planned return day, but at 5:30 am we awoke to the cries of newborn kittens!

We had taken our very pregnant cat with us, hoping she would wait until we got home again to have her kittens and didn't want to leave her home alone to have them either (it was a really tough decision) . Well, she had 5 kittens by 7:30, so the kids and I went back to grandma's, leaving Jessica behind to make sure that the mom and babies were doing OK and to get some zzzzs (she played midwife to Miss T all morning). I caught up on emails and notified those who needed to know that I was going to be gone an extra day. We then spent a soggy afternoon/evening at camp playing games.

Friday was packed up and cleaned up and headed for home. We got home around 4 pm and crashed - no unpacking, just glad to be home!

Lots of memories, and lost sleep, but it was a great time and we are already working on planning our next get away!