Camping at Dash Point State Park

Our camping trip in pictures, with captions that I will attempt to keep brief but will probably fail at keeping brief. Meaning there will be at least one long explanation, and probably more like 3. See, I can’t even keep this brief.

    

Kids picking blackberries while the adults set up camp.

Baby blue eyes.

My other baby blue eyes.

And my brown eyed boy, complete with blackberry face.

We pretty much always have chili and fritos for our first nights dinner when we’re camping. Lily does not approve.

The preferred activity. Uncle Josh, Uncle Jonathan, and Aunt Anna are way cooler than Mom and Dad. It was lots of fun to have them camping with us.

Two at a time!

Pretty girl. Before her haircut.

Cooking our peach cobbler in a borrowed dutch oven. It was good!

My cute chunk-a-lunk at the beach.

Handsome Uncle Josh. He’d only been home from his mission for about a week! I was glad that the kids weren’t shy around him.

Braving the seaweedy water.

I don’t think Michael got in the water until the very end. He really enjoyed playing in the sand.

Handsome husband with a cute baby. He’s a sweetheart. The beach isn’t really his thing, but he went anyway cuz he knows how much we were all looking forward to it. And he never even complained! He’s a saint.

Aww, working together.

Seesters!

Pretending they’re rowing a boat.

Cute baby.

He secretly loves it when I take his picture.

See?

Musick boys being Musick boys.

Of course we dug a big pit.

Back at camp, enjoying sweet potatoes.

Enjoying something a little sweeter than potatoes.

Look who came to visit! We love Becky. Elizabeth and Mike came too. It’s always nice to see them, and they got to meet Peter for the first time.

My mom came to visit too! All these visitors while we were camping, we felt so fancy.

Cuties.

One of the last pictures before we left. We had so much fun!. I really enjoyed spending the time with my siblings, and with Ben before he had to go back to work after paternity leave. I apparently didn’t get any pictures of it, but Jonathan brought a slackline and set that up, and that was really cool. I didn’t think I was that bad for a beginner, but Josh dominated. He got on for the first time, and was like a pro just a few attempts later. Of course Jonathan showed us both what’s what. It was lots of fun.

I’m definitely thinking we need to make it an annual thing to go camping with the whole big fam. Maybe next year we can do one with Ben’s side of things too! Yay for camping!

Bonus picture: Lily and Michael on a camel at the Point Defiance Zoo! Lots of fun!

Random Summer Shenanigans

Well, it’s officially fall and I still have so much I want to share from the summer! I’m going to try to speed-blog (which I’ve never been good at, but I’ll try!) and get out a couple posts while it’s still (mostly) fresh in my mind.

From early early on in the summer, enjoying the kiddie pool we have in the backyard.

    

Adam liked the pool, but only if no one was splashing. Which meant he spent a lot of time pouting cuz the older kids wouldn’t stop jumping and splashing.

See? He has a fantastic pout.

Peter in his blessing outfit. I know Ben already blogged about that, but I didn’t have this picture on the computer then, and I wanted to put it on here. I just love this picture. So sweet.

Another cute Peter picture. 3 months old!

Ben and I celebrated our 8th anniversary on July 21st. Ben had the day off and we mostly just enjoyed spending lots of time with our cute family. We went to Red Lobster for lunch and went to a park that afternoon where Ben caught his first fish! I had bought him a fishing pole for Father’s Day, so he was pretty excited to finally catch something after trying for months.

My handsome man on our anniversary.

His first fish! Unfortunately not big enough to keep, but still fun to get something!

   

The kids trying their hands at it.

The next day we had a little camp-out in our backyard. Well, more of just a BBQ over the fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, too. I really love our little firepit. I had an idea to cement together a bunch of rocks that were just laying around into a cute little firepit, and Ben helped make the idea happen. Of course, one of the kids fell in it (when it was empty, thank goodness!) and broke off one side of it. Maybe one day we’ll fix it again. Still works well enough and for now we’ll just enjoy it lopsided.

This messy face makes me smile.

Look at that determination! Haha!

S’mores were, of course, everyone’s favorite part.

Uh-huh, yummmmm!

Peter just hanging outside with us, wishing he could have marshmallows!

Cool kids feeding the birds at the Woodland Park Zoo. We’ve been getting a yearly membership for the last few years, and we all really enjoy it.

Adam enjoying his first bites of solid food. He liked it! He was exactly 4 months old. Earliest I’ve started any of my kids on solids, but it felt right. He totally took to it and didn’t even have the tongue thrust reflex thing, which is good.

Happy boy!

Josh came home!! His plane got in early, so Ben dropped off the kids and me so we could rush in and hopefully catch him as he came out, but we ended up missing him anyway. Bummer! And then Ben wasn’t in the picture cuz he was parking the car. :/ But all the same, so nice to finally see Josh again! So weird that he hadn’t seen Adam since he was a baby, and now we have a whole new baby. It was nice for him to meet Peter.

Love this picture of Josh with the parents. The look so happy to have him home!

Ok, last thing and then I’ll wrap this up, and I’ll have to include our camping trip in a separate post. Adam has this thing that he picked up from the older kids. They’ve stopped doing it, but Adam won’t stop. He did it all summer, wherever we were. It’s super adorable, and definitely not appropriate, but too cute to stop. It’s where he sings “Shake your booty at everyone you see!” and it’s accompanied by exactly that. It’s way too cute. He’ll probably be super embarrassed in 10 years when he realizes this has been so publicly shared, but too bad!

So these pictures started out with that booty dance. And then it was just fun to dance outside on the wet porch. I’m not sure why he lost his pants in the process (usually the dance is performed with pants). Oh well! Too cute not to share!

    

         

I’ll leave you with a gorgeous picture of the sky from a pretty summer night. I love sunbeams!

It was actually even prettier in person. Couldn’t get the settings on my camera right. And it didn’t last very long, either. I’m glad I got to see it, it made me smile.