Family Camp Day One: The Great Outdoors

Today we celebrated "The Great Outdoors" on our first day of family camp.

We drove to a park in the canyon (free!) and attempted some rock climbing (which was a bust). Then we went on a nature hike heading toward the waterfalls (with Alice-Grace freaking out the whole time that we wouldn't find our way back -- she's convinced that I'm always getting us lost).

The highlight of our nature walk was our tape bracelets. We put a ring of tape (sticky side out) on our wrists and stuck various leaves, flowers, shells, etc. on them that we found along the way. Please note that Nigel has a big hunk of broken glass on his.
Half-way to the waterfalls Alice-Grace starting complaining that her legs hurt, so we stopped at a campground and had a delicious picnic lunch. What we did not realize is that it must've been the peak of caterpillar season because they were dropping on us from the trees right and left! Finally Jeffrey had enough and exclaimed, "Can we go home? All these bugs are creeping me out!" This from the boy who keeps snails as pets. Check out this branch that is COVERED with them!
So we headed back to the park and tried to search for water bugs in the river with our homemade waterscopes. I LOVED the waterscopes, I thought they worked great -- but the kids were not impressed.
We attempted to fly a kite, but that resulted in much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from my children. We tried to do some leaf imprints (pounding leaves with rocks on white cloth), but instead of producing beautiful green designs, it just produced horrendous noise.

The kids' favorite part was our impromptu talent show in the park's amphitheater and filling up their water bottles from an old fashioned water pump.

After much complaining, I figured my kids are not the "outdoorsy" types and we soon left the canyon and headed to a bookstore and then to a gourmet chocolate shop (yes, we spent money -- but since it was on food, does it break the rules?).

Back home, we learned about campfire safety and used pretzel sticks and frosting to demonstrate different ways of building fires.

That evening we went to the local life science museum (free admission) and saw a show on animal adaptations. It was excellent and I was quite impressed with Frances, who knew most of the answers (she's addicted to "Animal Planet"). Frances and Alice-Grace were very brave and held a California king snake and a blue-tongue skink, while Jeffrey and I just watched -- from afar.
We were supposed to use our new camping skills to build a fire and roast marshmallows, but a sudden storm came up and it was much too windy and cold. We'll have to save that for another day (they weren't content to just roast marshmallows over the stove like we usually do).

All in all we had a lot of fun and the kids seemed to enjoy our time together as a family. Sure not everything worked out the way I thought it would, but we're all still speaking to each other and no one wound up in the emergency room. So far, so good!