Camping with the BFF

Ginny and I have been best friends since we were 11 years old.  Which means, we stumbled through those teenage and young adult years together...dreaming of the day we would have husbands and children of our own.  Not just that, but that AND...we'd do it all together.

I went and messed things up when I got married and moved far away.  Ginny and I of course stayed best friends, but a lot of the big stuff we didn't get to do together.  I didn't get to go to her wedding, we weren't at the hospital to see each other's kids be born, and our kids aren't inseparable like we were.

Now that we live close again, we try to make up for the time we missed.  We meet up for dinner regularly (each driving one hour and meeting in the middle), and we drop by whenever we have the chance.  But this summer we really stepped it up by taking a camping trip--TOGETHER.  And boy did we have fun!!

When we were trying to decide how long to go for, I realized that I hadn't been camping as "the mom" for more than one night at a time!  So I decided 3 nights was my absolute max...so that's what we did 4 days and 3 nights.  I could barely fit everything in my car.

We camped at Zion's Camp (a church owned campground in Bellfair, WA).  We had super warm, beautiful weather and our cabins were closest to the lake.  We set up our cabins (which were one room each with 8 sets of bunk beds and plastic covered mattresses) including our very own clothes line.

The lake was my favorite part of the whole trip.  The first few days we basically had the entire thing to ourselves.  We paddle boarded, canoed, swam, jumped off the dock, slid down the slide, rode the pedal boats, pushed each other off the dock, played in the sand, floated in tubes, jumped off the life guard stand, learned to dive...and the list goes on.  

It's strange to me that Summer really doesn't like to go in the water...all my other kids loved it at her age.  But she is happier sitting on the sand and playing with her bucket and shovel.  I took her out on the tube with me, but most of the time she was crying to get off.

The first night, the kids swam until dark.  We were the only ones there and it was still nice and warm.  Jordan and Kya worked on their diving!

 

 On our last day this group of kids spent probably 3+ hours on this floating dock.  Just pushing each other in until there was only one left standing.  It's amazing that nobody got sunburned.

All the food turned out really great, which is a bit of a surprise since we are amateur campers.  Our foil dinners were the biggest project and they were delicious.  It was nice to have a fire every night...and smores.

These two just couldn't get enough of each other!  It's really one of the first times I've seen Summer actually "play" with another kid who wasn't in our family.  They were having little conversations, playing hide and seek, getting super dirty, it was so cute.  I see an arranged marriage in their future.  

We made some great memories, and I hope our kids grew a little closer together.  We may have to make this a new tradition!