Family Campout

Last week we had our Palmer family campout. It appears we're making this a bi-annual event, and it's a blast! Mind you, we froze our tooshies off the first night (well, everyone else did anyway), but it was a blast.

We arrived on Thursday and were told there was a mom and baby moose and a mom and baby bear in the area so to keep the kids on the pathways and such. Okay, not the best thing to tell a mom with an overactive imagination as it is. (My SIL saw the bear, and that night when I needed to go to the restroom I couldn't bring myself to go in the middle of the night -- what if I unknowingly met up with the bear? Sigh.)

Anyway, there was still snow on the ground at our campground and around the yurts. Any idea what a yurt is? We make sure to get a campground with yurts, which are basically round cabins. We feel very blessed to go to the Heber Valley Campground, because it has running water, a fridge and a fire pit for each campground. And each restroom is shared between you and one other campground. It's very nice, but you have to schedule a year ahead, thus our decisions to go when it was so cold ...

Friday morning we played Minute to Win It. My sister Rebecca had it all planned out, and it was a blast. Here are some of the "contestants" during their attempts ...

Becca trying to use a baseball in nylons on her head to knock over water bottles:

Tyler trying to get a marble into the one black square on the racquet by using only his body movements:

Zachary trying to catch pencils that were resting on the back of his hand:

Shayla trying to balance dice on a popsicle stick in her mouth:

Paul trying to blow cups off the table from a balloon he had to blow up:

The most difficult game that made everyone dizzy -- try to get 120 counts on a pedometer attached to your forehead:

And the most amazing feat? My brother Dustin rolled a quarter into the times of a fork:

I didn't think that one was possible.

The sweetest thing that happened was the last night of the campout. We had knelt down for family prayer, and Austin followed our lead and folded his arms and then cocked his head to the side. It was adorable! We tried to get him to do it again, and this is what I got:

As mentioned, my SIL saw a bear, but her baby bear is the only one I saw:

Shayla happened to pack her "Snow Princess" shirt, so of course I had to take a picture of her with one of the snow piles:

The boys LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Grandpa's swords. He brought them again, and they are always a hit. (If you haven't seen a yurt, you can look at this one in the background):

This was a game my dad brought. Each pipe has different holes and shapes. Then you put a golf ball in the end one and everyone tries to pass it along without dropping it. Some of the pieces were REALLY tricky -- you'd have to spin it over while the golf ball was inside of yours or it would drop. In any case, it took a lot of practice to finally get it through without dropping it:

Sometimes you just get a strikingly adorable picture you just have to share. That's what this is:

Honestly I don't think I've ever seen Gavin so relaxed:

Here are the babies enjoying some marshmallows. Okay, Austin is the only one who ate any, and he ate two! Gavin wasn't interested, and James isn't old enough so his were taken away (so he took the bag instead). This was at the end of the family movie where the girls were looking everywhere for the marshmallows. Different family members had various "conspiracy theories" to describe what really happened to the marshmallows, but it turns out that it was the babies all along:

And speaking of marshmallows, my mom brought up HUGE marshmallows! The one in Becca's hand is the normal "jumbo" size like with the babies above. The roasted one is one of the huge ones, and she knows how to roast them perfectly. She became the family roaster and made one for anyone who asked. Too bad there's not a scholarship for that!

We also roasted Starburst for the first time (well, Becca had done it before but the rest of us hadn't), and they were definitely YUMMY!

We also did a ropes course that was crazy scary, but I'll post about that later. For now dream of perfectly roasted marshmallows ...