Jared and Amy's blog: September 2009

We went camping over Labor Day Weekend. Jared and I were both coming down with horrible colds, but this is the vacation that our boys most look forward to, so we sucked it up and went anyway. Andrew's very favorite thing about camping is the camp-fire. It's the first thing he wanted to do when we got there. I don't know why I didn't get a picture of him by it, but oh well. My very helpful uncle Jim decided to give Andrew and Braden a tutorial in fire building. Apparently I am too strict with the fun stuff, so now I'm going to have to hide the matches. Before then neither of them had ever been allowed to even hold a match. I guess I'm a sheltering mom, but is it so horrible to make my life easier by putting dangerous things off-limits? The second favorite pastime for the boys was target shooting with BB guns. Yes, I allowed my 6 and 8 year old boys to play with guns. Take that, Uncle Jim. It caused me much stress, but I know I was allowed to shoot BB guns when I was barely strong enough to hold them up and I survived. My mom was from a tiny rural town and things like guns and campfire and driving trucks and tractors were just not a big deal. If you were tall enough to do it physically, they let you do it. Especially if it lightened someone else's load. Here are my little marksmen:

We took a nice little hike up to Windy Point. It's a short enough hike that the little kids can do it and it still has a nice view at the end. Jared put Caleb in our baby backpack and I was able to enjoy walking without my little sidekick. He's almost too small to go in there, but we just propped him up with a blanket and he slept almost the whole time. Nice.