Our first camping trip

We went on our first camping trip in the middle of August.  I guess you can't call it real camping because we weren't "tenting" it by any means.  We were actually spending the night in my parents' RV.  However, we had it parked at a campground if that counts!!  This camping trip was planned well before Elli died.  And we seriously contemplated if we should even follow through with the original plans.  But in the end, we decided that we needed to do something "normal" as a family and couldn't deprive the girls of their first experience camping.  They had a lot of fun on grandma and grandpa's "bus" and they each had a little trick up their sleeve...

The second night they were kind of refusing to sleep, so Nate and I drove them home (luckily we were at a campground only 20 minutes away) so they could sleep in their own beds.  Early the next morning, we got a call from my mom asking if we had accidentally taken my brother Jason's keys.  Ummm, nope.  So they searched and they searched and they searched.  By the time we got back to the campground, they had found them.  You want to know where?  In the girls' ziploc crayon bag!  You want to know who takes ownership to hiding them in the crayon bag?  Addi.  She flat out confessed to putting them in there.  Luckily everyone found it rather funny.  Otherwise she would've had a lot of explaining to do because she had grandpa digging through the garbage (in the campground dumpster, not just our own garbage!) looking for those keys!!  What a sneaky little girl.

Livi's little trick didn't come to light until a couple weeks later when my parents went on a camping trip by themselves.  As the air was running, they heard something kind of rattling in the vent.  When they got to the campground and turned the RV off, it sunk back in.  So dad restarted the RV only for a cap of some sort to come shooting out.  Not thinking much of it, they tossed it in the garbage.  Not long after, they decided they wanted to listen to the radio.  And drumroll please...the radio knob was missing.  Haha!  We knew she was sitting in the driver's seat quite often on our camping trip playing with all the buttons.  But no one was aware that she had removed the radio knob and jammed it down one of the A/C vents!!  Oops.  Good thing they hadn't taken out the trash yet!

Anyway, here are some pictures of our first camping trip.

They drew pretty pictures outside the RV.

Livi watched aunt Chelsea color a rainbow.

She rode a motorcycle!

And a dinosaur!!

Addi built...well, I'm not sure what.

She enjoyed the swings.

And she plunged down the frog waterslide!

I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I normally do.  But life's simply not normal right now.  Life will never be normal ever again.  I'm trying harder every day to remember to take more pictures and videos of the girls just like I used to.  I don't want to forget a single moment of them growing up (which is one of the reasons this blog was created).  I never used to go more than a couple days without taking pictures or a week without video.  My picture taking has dropped to once a week if I'm lucky.  And the video footage?  It's dismal.  I need to continue to work on it.  I promise I will.