camping out

We camped out as a family several times this summer.  The boys also camped out with cousins on the Kerns side for about a week, as well.  This was our first camp out of the summer and Anni's first camp out:

cooking foil dinners:

We camped at Umatilla Forks campground.
LOTS of crawdads in this river, which everyone was looking at:

The second day, Nolan decided he wanted to try out his new mess kit, so he set out to catch some crawdads.  He was more cautious about this than he has been in the past, since the last time he caught one, he got pinched pretty good.  

The whole process was pretty entertaining to us all.  The crawdads started out as a dark creepy black....

And as they were cooked they turned into a nice crimson color!:

Nolan buttered them and cut into them and everyone was a good sport and ate a *very tiny* piece.  There wasn't much to them!  Later I was telling Caden about it and he said that in Texas, everyone calls them Crawfish and cook up buckets of them and eat them.

Anni and I sampling Nolan's hammock:

Shawn standing beside us to give perspective about how high up Nolan put this thing.  He even slept here and said it was pretty comfortable:

Abram started making a fairy garden around an old stump and he and I really got into that for awhile: