The Great Family Camping Adventure...pt1

...happened about a month ago. And it did not go at all as planned.

Several months ago my friend K went to South Dakota to visit my friend S.

Crazy Horse in South Dakota

I admit I was a bit jealous because I would have liked to visit too. I've known S since high school after all, when K was only 3 years old. And now my friend is being friends with my other friend and I cant go!? (Actually, I probably could have gone but I didn't make arrangements because I didn't think I could and I really shouldn't be so petty anyway. Its a good thing that my friends like each other, right?)

A few weeks before camping S's sister said her family and K's were going up to go camping with S's family in South Dakota and would we like to go? Yes, we would like to go but we only have 2 sleeping bags and 1 small 2-man tent which we haven't used in 12 years. So no, probably not.


But I really wanted to spend some time with my friends and the kids have never been camping. It's only for 2 days after all, so yes, I guess we will go.

Wait? Where are we gonna sleep? We called around and were able to borrow a large 2 room tent, more sleeping bags, coolers, lanterns, camp stove, the works. Great!

Wait? Who will watch the dogs while we're gone? OK. That's covered.


Wait? How much does it cost? I assume we have to pay for the site or something. Between $2-3 a person we were told. So for 2 nights that's about $30 give or take. I guess we can manage that. (Gabe's business is still quite slow mind you, and we are still living off of savings, which is dwindling rapidly.)

So now, about a week before the trip we are good to go. (All this time and for a long time before I've been mentioning to Gabe that the car is acting up and we need to get it looked at. I mean, I'm just a dumb girl with no knowledge of cars at all but it seems like the transmission is a little wacky. But what do I know? Gabe agrees that it probably need to be looked at but neglects to do anything about it...)

Then Gabe talks to J, S's husband. J informs us that actually the camp sites are 8 persons per site (so we pretty nearly fill that up) and they are $30 per night. Twice as much. Plus we have forgotten that it'll probably take 2 tanks of gas just to get to South Dakota from here. Another $120.

Oh. Deflate. (This is why I tend to avoid telling the kids our plans until we are actually there. The whine and waterworks times 4 is grating to say the least. However, Gabe tends to spill the beans earlier.)

We inform J that because of finances we don't think we can make it. Thanks for thinking of us, we miss you guys. J calls backs a few minutes later and offers to pay the campsite fees for us. Really? Wow! Thank you so much! After discussing it we are back on go with only 2 days til take off.

The girls and I spend parts of 2 days packing and baking cookies and bread and graham crackers for s'mores. Gabe picks up all the camp equipment that we are borrowing and comes home with more than we planned for. ( We have such generous friends!)


Friday morning we have breakfast, pack our last minute items and get the dogs ready for their house guest. Gabe spends an hour or 2 packing up the van and deciding what must go and what need to stay for lack of room. (We need to learn to use the luggage rack on top, the girls could barley breath and it's a 5-6 hour drive.)

Everyone's in the car now except me. I'm giving the kitchen the last once over and grabbing my iced chai for the road. Gabe comes in and says the car wont start. Oh. He tried in vain to jump the van with his dinky little car. No go.

We called S and J to say that although we were ready to go our car was not. Gabe was still hopeful that we could get it moving but I was not so sure.

Two hours later the mechanic has said that we have a faulty battery which cost $100 to replace. And he said that the transmission is going out and ought to be fixed very soon. (The transmission! Hmmmm. Imagine that!) He said that while he couldn't guarantee that we could make it the 800 miles, he was pretty sure it would be OK. Pretty sure.

We've already spent $100 more than we planned and there will be over $100 more for gas just to be 'pretty sure' we wont break down somewhere in the middle of the great vast nothingness that is Wyoming.

Somewhere in Wyoming

(We had a previous car who's transmission went out and was repaired. Twice. We then went on a road trip to California. We broke down in Nevada. Another wide empty space. Thankfully we had just pulled into a little town, but we were only an hour or so from our planned destination for the weekend. We were forced to stay in a hotel for the weekend instead. And we bought a car over the phone and left that one there.)

Deflate again. The car is still packed full and the girls are still hopeful, but we cannot, in good judgement, travel so far with 4 young children in a van so jam packed that even the smallest can't shift her bum 2 inches to the left, when we only maybe will be able to take the 800 miles in 1 weekend with out breaking down.

Now, despite the fact that I am the least likely candidate to even suggest camping in the first place, I am also the most positive of the bunch. I had been going back and forth in my head as to whether or not there is a reasonably priced place nearby that we could camp. Nothing came to mind so I had planned to check the Internet. Until Gabe said we needed to avoid driving the van as much as possible. Nix the driving all over the Colorado mountains idea.

Colorado mountains (a bit hazy)

So we'll pitch camp in the yard.

*Moans* *Pouts* and *Whines* "I really wanted to go to South Dakotaaaa."

"Yes I know. We all did, but unfortunately that didn't work out."

Even Gabe seemed skeptical and showed signs of rebellion.

"No," says I, "we are pitching camp in the yard and were going camping this weekend as planned. We'll still have fun. You'll see."

...to be continued.

Meliss

Where I Create...(hopefully these will be 'before' photos)

I just read the new edition of 'Where Women Create', they have such beautiful studios. All filled with glitter and billowy fabric and soooo many lovely little storage containers. To store things. I like keeping things neat and orderly. I like having my sock drawer organized and it is very vexing when someone (named Gabe)(who does the laundry)('cause laundry is a boys job, so there) puts the short sleeved shirts in the same pile as the long sleeved shirts. Yes. Vexing. However, as you may have guessed, I am grossly outnumbered (5-1) in the 'lets keep things neat and orderly' department. And despite my efforts to do so, things are not kept as neat and orderly as I would like. Even when I label them with little pictures on them like this:


I also suffer from a sever lack of neat little totes. (And I probably have more than the 'normal' person) But that's my excuse. Because while I'd love for my studio to look like that:









images from 'Where women Create' fall '09


(and by studio, I mean the tiny space that used to be a small portion of the family room but now houses all of my crafts, plus the kids school, plus Gabe's home business) sadly, it looks like this:

And this is on a good day. I even cleaned up a little. Note Gabe's space in the background. Surprisingly, mine looks worse at the moment. Don't know how that happened.




Here are some of my plans to improve my studio (apart from building above the garage where I would have a studio with a kitchenette and a balcony overlooking my tea garden-which is really a weed garden right now, but that's another story).

My desk is far too small for me and Gabe's is too small for him, we also have a tiny house (before we finished the basement we had 860 square feet) with a tiny bedroom so I plan to remove the closet doors and replace them with either bi-folds or a pretty curtain. That way I can use 1 or both doors as a nice big desk. Then Gabe can have mine. I also plan to move him so I can have this whole space to myself. I don't like sharing. (Last week Gabe said he was going to send me back to kindergarten so I can learn how to share) (I said stay away from my chocolate, buddy.)

I hope eventually to add some more shelves and of course paint and make a slipcover for my ugly chair. ( I have several ugly chairs of various sizes. I love their style but they really are ugly)
And I definitely need more neat little containers with labels. Definitely.

Please tell me I'm no the only one with desk issues...

Meliss

A Thwarting of Plans

I'm trying to think of something great and inspiring to say but nothings coming to me. I'm feeling frustrated and far from uninhibited.

My intentions have been thwarted starting last night. I was making an outfit for my second daughter, a pretty white dress to wear for a special occasion, when my machine jammed. Now in reality the first thing to go wrong was that I could not find the brand new needles that I had bought for my machine a month or so ago. I know they were there a few weeks ago but they seem to have vanished. I decided to continue with the general size needle that was in the machine and everything was going great until the last bit. All I needed to do was finish sewing a bit of ribbon round the end, but the machine is far more finicky and stubborn than me and refused to comply. Oh, I cleaned it (at least 5 times), reinserted the bobbin, rethreaded the machine and did various other tricks to get it to go, but alas, it has denied me my last few stitches.

It's done this before and from all my research and questioning of seasoned seamstresses, as near as I can tell, it needs a different needle for this fabric. Of course, my needles have disappeared. (When my youngest daughter was 2, she was quite a little pilferer. Absconding with computer cords and wedding rings and such, and hiding them in places like an old sock in the back of the closet or something. Her favorite spot was a cabinet in the kitchen filled with large pots and a slow cooker. Sometimes she would pop out of "her cabinet" when guests were over and give them a good jump. We always checked there first if something was missing. However, we no longer live in that house, and she has picked up new and exciting odd habits, like drawing bald princesses and stuff. So I'm sure it wasn't her. I think.)

Good intentions continued to be thwarted today. Since the dress is not done, I did not have a picture of my recent artistic endeavour to share with you. A bit of a bummer, since I tend to agree that the best blogs (especially art blogs) have pictures of the artist's work on them.

I did not get the sleep I had planned for and in turn woke late because baby boy has caught someones cold. Again. Poor little guy is all boogified and gross. I was tired and it was late and any number of other excuses I can think of, kept me from really exercising today. I have a 10minute workout that is designed to give you a good workout when you are short on time, and it really is a good work out. I did that one so I can at least say I did something. And I did try hard but, I'm so weak! Two years ago, a little before I became pregnant with baby, I could do jump training and a pretty decent amount of push ups for a mom that wasn't in perfect shape. Now I can barely get through normal aerobics and I couldn't do even 1 good push up (on my knees, no less) in the 10 minutes that I "worked out".

If that wasn't depressing enough, today was budget day. Ahh, budget day. Where checkbooks are balanced and bills are paid. Supposedly. This process can take me less than an hour. I know this because I've done it before. Once. I think I was the only one home that day. Under normal circumstances, (normal being 4 kids asking me to feed them, or help with math, or mend a sock, or feed them, or clean up a spill, or feed them), it takes 2-3 hours. (As I mentioned, Gabe lost a long standing job, making budget day a bit more discouraging. It wasn't the best job, but it covered our expenses allowing me to be a stay home mom to our, then, 3 children, with the tiniest bit left over to occasionally splurge or save up for something. About 2 months after Gabe was laid off, we had another surprise in the form of my pregnancy. Which turned out to be our boy, so now Gabe, while still hopelessly outnumbered, has some backup.)

I guess I should be thankful, though. When I work the numbers and look at the bank account we are not even covering expenses. We still make much less than we owe, despite the fact that we have whittled more than $1000 off our monthly outgo since last year. Yes, we've gotten help from resources like WIC and LEAP and the local food bank, but the numbers still don't work out. Yet for some reason, we still seem to have the money to pay the bills as they come.

I often think in terms of groceries (such n such bill equals so much groceries we cant afford to buy) and recently I've been very downhearted by the fact that we cant afford the luxury of fresh fruit or greens (which used to fill at least a third of the cart each week). But then again, the food bank sometimes has lovely fresh produce (even better than some stores). The food bank also gives me more pinto beans than is humanly possible to use. But I have many great recipes that call for pinto beans (and I could always make juggling balls with them. I have at least 12 pounds worth.) Also, just in the last 2 days, friends have given us bags of veggies and other small items that we could use.

We also plan to try our hand at gardening again this year (though neither one of us is stellar at it, I know how to grow zucchini! and I happen to like it too.) When I mentioned it to a friend, he offered us the raised beds he had built last year. I was thinking he might offer some advice on how to build them, but instead, he took them out and brought them over!

I had all these great ideas for what today's post should be about and I forgot all of them. They were going to be witty and inspired and full of general coolness. (Instead I'm quite frustrated by the constant interruptions. Then again, I think everyone else is frustrated by my insistence on silence.) (silence in a house with 4 kids and 4 pets and 1 Gabe? Is that an oxymoron?)

There was no being uninhibited today. There was no "bringin it". There wasn't even a finished skirt that only had 5 minutes worth of sewing left on it. But I do have (relative) quiet to write in, I have a husband who is (attempting to) make a delicious Indian dish with our many (many) onions and potatoes delivered by loving friends, along with some chicken graciously provided by our local food bank. I have a nice house to live in, (the "nice" part was also loving provide by friends, but that too, is another story). My kids are healthy (other than the boogies), we have a silly movie to enjoy together, and my goals are still within reach.

No, there was no being uninhibited (I find I'm not very good at it), but there is still tomorrow. And I'm sure along with it will be many more things to be thankful for, many more opportunities to step out of my comfort zone, and more time to work toward my goal of being uninhibited. What was it I said? "In art and family and spirituality"? Still sounds good.

Despite the very unproductive and "down" type of day that I've had, (did I mention that we also found a dead cat on our 1/2 acre property today? Just to add to the yuckness of the day, I suppose.) Despite that, I really have nothing to complain about.

Meliss

p.s. So how does one get any work done with 4 kids, 4 pets, and 1 "Gabe"around anyway?