exhaustedx3: August 2010

The Annual Jamboree! 2010 Edition.

This, as a slightly neurotic mother, is always how you like to start out a four day long camping trip...right? Pouring rain. It is definitely how you like to start a camping trip if you fall into the 03-11 age bracket. Abi certainly enjoyed the opportunity to don a raincoat and mix up a "taste" snack of pine needles and mud. Later she added her leftover macaroni, disgusting!

Our resident animal lover, Audrey uses the post downpour to locate every living creature the forest floor has to offer. She is amazingly good at it too! Here she is with a horny toad. I wonder if it's the same toad she catches every year...He seems very docile for a wild animal.

Should we submit this picture to the swagger wagon committee? Who knew so many Odyssey's could make it so far into the woods. Us Toyota people need to represent. Next year I think I'll invite someone with a Sienna just because.

The Jamboree. It is the camping trip of all camping trips. Just ask anyone else who as ever been. We eat. This year we had on top of all the traditional delicious food (green chile, beer bread, Julie's amazing happy hour and chili of course) we had a salsa-off. I think someone was just jealous of my title from last year... In all honesty though, there were some really fantastic salsas. It made fitting in dinner difficult.

We sing. Doesn't everyone? Fred is a tradition all by himself and the kids would have it no other way. At one point during this years performance, the kids were demanding an encore, I looked over Travis and said, "He better think of something fast or I'm afraid this could turn ugly." Kind of like a Gulliver's Travels sort of thing.

The boys.

The matriarch's. Camping with chilled martini glasses of course!

Fred performing with a very precarious beer perched on his music stand...

The girls. The kids circle is getting so big I can't fit them all into the picture anymore. Plus, it's growing! Jill and Nikki both had big news to share this year.