Camping and life

Last weekend we had our first camping trip as a family.  Dan wanted to go for his birthday this year, similar to how he took Elliott 3 years ago.  We went with a group of friends.  Unfortunately we live in Oregon where it likes to be cold and rainy all the way through June.  Of course it started to rain as soon as we set up camp.  The rest of that day and all night it rained steadily.  Thankfully it stopped raining on Saturday and we had a full day of pretty decent weather - even blue skies at some points.  Elliott and I took a hike to the new Tillamook Forest Center where we climbed the fire tower and walked around the trails.  He said that we were on a date - so sweet.  Elliott was a great camper and played well even though there weren't any other kids around.  Holly was pretty good.  She had some trouble sleeping - which is par for the course with her.  Holly is the lightest sleeper, quite a change from Elliott who doesn't wake up for anything.  We had fun and have talked about maybe doing another camping trip with just us.

Our friend, Rizal, was happy to play around with my camera and he took some great pictures for us.  I should take lessons from him.

I found Elliott asleep in the tent, even bringing him to sit with us by the fire didn't wake him up.

 This is the tarp that we had...amazing!  It took Brad and Dan over an hour to set up.

Playing card games

Getting wood before it started to rain too much

 This was the chipmunk trap that Elliott made:

Holly loved that she could see birds

When we got home Dan and I went to a Timbers game while Elliott and Holly played at Nana and Papa's house.  When we came back to get them, Holly took her first steps!  We've tried countless times to coerce her to do it again with no luck.  She knows what we are up to and absolutely refuses to try.  She was very much the same way with standing on her own.  I guess we just have to wait and let her make up her own mind.  She will now happily stand on her own (something she first tried just before we went camping) and loves the praise she receives for it.

Elliott is showing a lot of interest in numbers and letters.  We have been trying to encourage him by doing very simple math and also a lot of "what sound does this letter make..."  I'm excited that he is so interested in learning.  He is excited to start preschool in the fall.  He has a lot of ideas for games he wants to play, though will often get irritated that I don't remember his ever changing rules.  He still loves to play legos and would happily dump them all over his playroom if Holly wasn't around.  With the weather finally improving we hope to spend more time outdoors.

Holly has been improving, slowly, with her sleep.  I've been working with her to cut out some of her bottles.  She liked to have a bottle before each nap (2 a day), before bed and often 2-3 times during the night.  Ugg!  We are successfully cut out the bottle before her first nap and she will sometimes go down for her second nap without one.  We have been lucky that about half the time at night now she will only take one bottle around 3am.  Even though, in my opinion, she is probably taking too many bottles because she eats a ton during the day, she is slowly improving.  We were so spoiled with Elliott, he was the best sleeper and it was so easy to makes any changes to his schedule/routine.