Camping Nightmares

I really like liked camping. Our kids do did too. I planned this camping trip for this past weekend with hopes this would be our favorite trip yet.
First off, just getting ready to go was difficult. The plan was to go without Steve and he would meet up with us that night after he got off work and drove up the canyon. I had to pack up all our gear. It was my first day of vomiting from this pregnancy, so it was hard to get out the door. {Bad omen number 1} But we got on our way eventually.

Finding a spot to camp was really difficult. When I did find us a spot and started unloading the kids and our stuff, some man came over and insisted that he needed that place more than I did. That forced me to load up our things again, and do some more hunting and hiking around to find a place for us. I finally found us a spot which was very out of the way and you had to hike into it, cross a creek, and walk a ways in to get to it. It was far from any form of civilization and up on a rocky little hill. No water, no toilets/latrines, no real fire pits. {Bad omen number 2} I went ahead and quickly set up camp. While getting our tents up, I cut my thumb, and Charity hit her head on the ground. {Bad omen number 3}

I then got the kids back in the car and quickly drove back out of the canyon so I could call Anna & Dana & Steve (who were all going to camp with us.) I let them know that this was gonna be pretty rugged camping so they probably were not gonna like it. Anna and Dana readily backed-out. I wanted to talk Steve out of coming up because he's not into camping and I didn't want him to come and be terribly uncomfortable. But he was cool and said he would still come. Which I'm glad he did because I really needed him later.

We then drove back up the Canyon to our campsite and had a few hours of fun.

Eden enjoyed gathering a bouquet of wildflowers. All of the kids enjoyed gathering firewood.
Charity enjoyed eating dirt.
Becca enjoyed peeing in the wild.
Jonah and I got a lot of Webelos Scouts things passed off together. He built this fire and was pretty proud of it. We cooked our dinner over this campfire too. It turned out good.
The kids enjoyed playing in the little creek.
Jonah actually took this photo of a watercrawler.
But that night, things took a turn for the worse. Around 8:30 Steve showed up. Thank goodness. When it was time to sleep, we put the 4 oldest kids in one tent next to us, and had Charity in our tent with us. Charity is a very sweet, easy going baby. But that night, she was screaming. This at the time truly felt like the {omen-est omen of all}. It took quite a bit to finally get her to calm down. The other kids were having too much fun to calm down too. Finally around 10:30 pm, we had everyone asleep. Then a storm hit. There was rain, thunder, and lightning. We were high up on that hill in the canyon. We felt somewhat exposed. The lightning and thunder were coming closer. Steve was getting pretty nervous. He finally made an executive decision and told us we all needed to get in the car and get the heck out of there. So we hurried and grabbed all the kids and rushed them to the car. Then Steve and I hiked back and forth multiple times in the storm to pack up all our things. We just kind of threw it all in the car. By 11:30, we were driving away.
So yeah, it wasn't the greatest camping trip.
Several lessons learned from that one...

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On an entirely different tone and topic:
This morning my YW and fellow leaders had a member of the General YW Board come visit us. It was pretty cool. She told us a few interesting things. One of which was they are redoing the "For Strength of Youth" pamphlet. (Which I do think is pretty outdated with those cheesy 90's images.) She showed us samples of the new one they are working and asked our input and criticism and advice on it. That was neat to be a part of. Super nice lady. Great experience.