Spring Break Camping

For spring break we took the family camping with my sister's family, and my mom and dad. We went to George L. Smith state park, which is beautiful. (I highly recommend it!) The campsites are directly on the lake and the lake is full of beautiful cypress trees that you have to navigate through with your canoe, or in our case, my sister's kayaks. We went for three nights. The first night there was a terrible storm. We knew it was coming and we were prepared. (Side story: My dad is a professional camper...seriously. We needed a tarp over our tent and there was one corner where we had nothing to tie the tarp to. So, my dad went and cut a huge limb and staked it into the ground with 2 other handmade stakes and tied our tarp to it. So the solution to not having a tree in a certain spot is to just put one there. It was quite impressive.) So, we lived through the horrific storm and constant lightning. It was so bad that all the maintenance workers from our park had to go over to another St. park close by that was all torn up from a tornado. The kids slept right through it. Night #2 was actually worse. A cold front had come in and it was cold. We had a space heater, but it went out at 3am and this is when Brooke woke up. After an hour of having her awake and Stan trying to fix the heater, I packed Brooke up in the van and found the closest Wal-Mart, after taking a wrong turn and adding about 40 minutes to the ride. I got there at 6am, just as it was opening. I bought an extension cord and a space heater. (The temp outside was a chilly 37 degrees.) My kiddos were sleeping well in the cold and were all bundled up, but I was still worried to death..b/c as a mother, that is what I'm supposed to do. I couldn't stop thinking about how their little noses were surely freezing. 3rd night we had a working heater and all slept well. We had a ton of fun camping. There was a great park there and we loved going out on the lake. The worst part, besides freezing that one night, was having Brooke with us. She is SUCH a busy body and was constantly on the move. If I looked away for a second she was walking over to some other campsite. Some of our neighbors got to know her pretty well. And camping right on a lake made me so nervous that she would want to get in the water. Luckily, that never happened. We have another camp-out planned for Memorial weekend next month down at FDR state park at Pine Mountain. It should be much warmer, so our only concern will be Brooke. The two other kids were in absolute heaven. Jake loves sleeping in a tent so much that he literally asks to go to bed as early as possible, and I don't discourage that. We had a really fun time and look forward to our next trip! Here are a few pics.