Camping, June 2013

When The Girl was born, I worked for a not-for-profit, alternative school near downtown Denver.  My official title was "Classroom teacher, special education coordinator, and Educational Coordinator".  At the time, my bosses were very understanding and we figured out a way for me to have a "real" maternity leave (as opposed to one of my bosses, who was back in the office the day after her youngest was born).  We also devised what we thought was a great plan...that I would be able to bring The Girl to work with me for at least a few weeks or months after my leave.  It was a lovely idea, and it worked really well for about two weeks.  But, despite not teaching any classes that fall and only doing administrative things, I quickly discovered that having a little person in tow limited the amount of work I was able to get done at work.  Cue the frantic search for childcare.  As those of you with little kids know, good daycare can be challenging to find, especially at the last minute.  We were very lucky to find a daycare with openings (that, ironically ended up being only 1 block from my next job, but that is a story for another day).  The saga of the daycare is a long and rambling tale, that has no relevancy to today's post, other than the friends that we made there.  The Girl was in the same class as two other little girls, who, over time, the three families have become very good friends.  Two of us families added younger brothers in the interim and the third added the world's cutest puppy.  For the past 3 years or so we've made it a yearly goal to camp together at least once.  One of the families had never camped before we corrupted them and the first trip was a rainy, soggy mess.  Thankfully, everyone had a good time and we've repeated the trip since.  This year our trip was to one of our favorite sites near Salida.  The Boy had recently found and appropriated his dad's copy of "Roughing it with Style" (or something like that) so he spent the weekend whittling things with his Boy Scout knife (earned by selling popcorn) and building shelters around overturned trees.  The rest of us played with the puppy, cooked in our outdoor kitchen (provided by "Javier"), and avoiding hummingbird dive bombs.  A nice start to the summer!

 There was also some fishing...not shown here, but this was the path to get there....

 As well as many rounds of Rumikub in the intermittent sprinkling..

a zipline, an archery range and, of course skit night...All in all, a successful trip!