The Grand Canyon and Camping

After Anika and the kids left, we headed out to Flag Staff and stayed the night and Kelly's Aunt Kathy's condo. We made yummy shish kabobs and ice cream cookie sandwiches.
After staying the night, we headed out to the Grand Canyon with Grandma Nalder and Aunt Kathy. I had never seen the Grand Canyon, and yes it is Grand!



We stayed one more night with them, then headed out on our camping trip. Kelly's mom has been wanting to go camping with the grandkids for a long time, but I think after all this driving with these little kids, they may have decided it is better to wait till they get a little older. The kids actually did pretty good. Gail and John have a ton of camping supplies. Great tents and chairs and even a nice eating tent. And most importantly, they had great dutch oven cooking supplies. We had an awesome meal: chicken, rice, and cornbread, upside down pineapple cake for dessert, and for breakfast, eggs, pancakes and sausage. Yummy!

We only camped for one night and that was my fault. My mouth started hurting really bad. I had had a problem with a tooth while in Latvia, but was going to wait since it didn't hurt as bad anymore and since I was in the first trimester of my pregnancy. I was going to get it taken care of while I was in Utah, but we were going to get dental insurance and it was going to start in September and only good in the DC area. So I decided I could wait, it wasn't so bad. Of course it started hurting like crazy while on this trip. Luckily I was able to make an appointment with a great dentist Phoenix for the next day, but that meant our little camping part had to end early. So, much to everyone's sadness, we ended our camping a day early. Actually, it didn't seem like anyone was too sad about not camping another night. It just would have been nice to be able to relax more in the morning instead of head out right after breakfast. (I had an infection in my tooth, needed a root canal, but I could wait till I got to DC, but I was just put on antibiotics and luckily that did the trick)

So camping was fun, setting up went really fast since they have really easy pop up tents, it took a while longer to break down the camp site. The kids just loved being outside in the woods, but they weren't too keen on sleeping outside. The boys did fine, went to sleep pretty fast, but Izzy had a really hard time. She just wasn't into the sleeping in a tent thing. We had a portable crib for her, but she didn't like the tent. So she was up a lot of the night. We all got woke up to the coyotes howling outside out tent in the middle of the night. Kelly's parents got up and Kelly helped them build a fire to protect us from those coyotes, the wouldn't have done anything, but just in case. Izzy tried sleeping by us, then in the crib, then by us, then finally she fell asleep around 2 am. After that night going home in the morning sounded like a good idea. She slept most of the way home.