Camping

Someone recently got the idea in their head that we should dig out our tent, dust it off and attempt a family camping trip.  So they thought it all through, talked to their husband and kid about it and then planned it out ever so cleverly and carefully.  The perfect time? Spring Break  The perfect location?  Well, this took some research.  After some thought and checking out average temperatures for several states for that week, this clever individual decided that South Carolina would be PERFECT.  It is usually chilly in the evenings and very pleasant during the days during the month of March.  Step two was to find a good campground since we're not die hard wilderness scouts or anything.  Turns out KOA has a couple very nice campgrounds right near Charleston, SC.  So now we had great weather, a nice campground, and a great location for sightseeing  - old plantations, Fort Sumter, etc.  Then a week before we were to leave, it got a little chilly here in [normally] warm, sunny Florida.  So I thought, "Hmmm...if it's colder here in Florida than it normally is at this time of year, maybe I better check the weather for Charleston, SC for this next week."  I should at least get credit for figuring out before we got there that we were going to freeze our tushes off if we moved forward with our plans.  It was going to start out fine but by about day two of our camping trip, it was going to turn rainy and stormy with the high temperatures being 50s during the days and then dropping down into the 30s and 40s during the night.  Kaelyn was very young the last time we went camping (for just one night) and she doesn't really remember it so this was kind of like a "first time try it out, see if she likes it" trial run.  We knew that if we went and were cold and miserable the whole time or weren't able to do anything and we had a bad experience, that Kaelyn would decide that camping was bad forever more after that and wouldn't ever want to try it again.  We ended up cancelling our reservations in South Carolina and finding another KOA a couple hours from home up in a more rural, less crowded area near Orlando.

Kaelyn was a very willing helper for awhile.  It took a little more time and effort to find things she could do and show her how to do it but she was so excited about the idea of camping that we wanted to include her in the set up as much as possible.

Unfortunately the cooler weather didn't arrive until later this evening and it was HOT while we were setting up the tent.  Kaelyn ended up starting to get a heat rash.  She was all itchy and had blotchy red spots.  I finally had her lie down in the only shady spot around us to cool off and rest.

She DID work enthusiastically though in the beginning.  :-)

Showing her how to stake down the tarp that we put under the tent.

Getting ready to go to the bathrooms to brush our teeth and get ready for bed.

For a kid who is autistic and doesn't always do changes in routine real well, she did AMAZINGLY well with the whole camping thing and even seemed to see it as novel and fun.  The first night when I told her we were going to go to the bathrooms to brush our teeth and stuff, she kind of balked at first.  When I got the toothbrushes out though, she wanted to carry her own stuff and from that point on, she was just fine with "going off" to the bathrooms to brush teeth, dress, shower, etc.

When it came time to go into the tent, she didn't even act like she thought it felt strange at all.  As a matter of fact, Kevin and I sat outside and read for awhile and she didn't seem to mind going into the tent and crawling into her sleeping bag and going to sleep on her own.

Then came the storms.  We didn't sleep very well at all the first night.  We didn't realize that we were only a few miles from the airport - it sure didn't feel like it since there were fields across the road from the campground on one side and a big lake on the other side.  By about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, all the red-eye flights started arriving in Orlando and I do believe that every single one flew right over the campground at 1000 ft. on their approach to the airport.  We were all a bit tired and strung out the next day.  We had bacon and eggs for breakfast (Kevin is quite a good campfire cook) and then just relaxed.  In the afternoon, we went into the tent to rest.  Kaelyn was playing on my phone and Kevin and I were dozing on and off a bit.  All the sudden, Kaelyn said, "Mom!  Something's wrong with your phone.  It said there was a warning."  Kevin and I both woke up instantly.  We checked the phone and it was sending alerts that we were under a tornado warning.  About that time, a couple guys from KOA were driving around letting everyone know.  We went in the recreation hall with the few other people who were still around the campground for the day.  The weather turned crazy!  It had been very windy all day but the wind picked up even more and there were sheets of rain coming down within minutes.  The tv in the rec room showed that a tornado had touched down  at the airport and the storm was moving right over us.  We had serious doubts that our tent would stay in one piece.  When the worst of the storm passed, we went back to the campsite to assess the damage.  Amazingly, our tent hadn't budged and everything was still fastened down and in place.  We did have some water in some places in the tent.  There was enough breeze and sun the rest of the afternoon and evening that we were able to get damp stuff out of the tent and have it air dry by that night.  We did have to take all of our towels to the laundry room and dry them since we had used them to dry wet spots in the tent etc.  Although most of the campsites right now are RVs, we did have a few tent neighbors.  They didn't fare quite as well as we did.

The guy that was staying in this tent across the canal from us was in Orlando for a convention and decided to  camp rather than stay in a motel.  After his tent caved in in the wind and got soaked, he just packed it up and went to a motel.

This tent belonged to a family from Ohio.  They got back to the campground somewhere around two in the morning. They had been at Disney for the day and pretty much figured that they would come back to what they did.  They had one teenage daughter.  They said, "We've been camping for 20 years and we've had worse things happen."  They slept in their truck that night and started putting things back together the next day.  Their food was all fine but everything else - clothes, bedding, and stuff - was SOAKED!  The tent went back up fine but everything they carried out had water running off of it.  I think I would have been too disheartened to keep camping but they seemed to take it in stride.

The rest of our adventure that day was with the van (we had borrowed Brown's mini van that they are trying to sell).  We had all the doors opened with the lights on too much and the van wouldn't start.  The people in the RV across from us brought their pickup and tried to jump it for probably 30 minutes or more but we still couldn't get the van to start.  We were still getting bands of rain off and on at that point and weren't sure how we were going to grill our hamburgers and hot dogs for supper.  AAA ended up coming out and they guy got the battery to charge with no problem.  Meanwhile, the rain finally seemed to go away for good so around 5:00 we got the van running, were able to get stuff from the tent drying out, and then Kay and I went and got in the pool while Kevin was able to get the grill going and grill DELICIOUS hamburgers and hot dogs.  I figured if nothing would have happened during the camping trip, we would have barely remembered it in the future but with all the adventures we had and crazy stuff that happened, we'll be sure to remember it for a LONG TIME.  :-)

Making dough boys over the hot coals on the grill.

We had a partial Kit-Kat that had melted.  We threw it in our garbage bag.  Kaelyn and I had gone to the bathroom and when we got back Kevin was taking pictures of this crazy squirrel.  He had dragged the candy bar and wrapper out and was going to town on it.  He ended up carrying it off and he finished the whole thing.  :-)

He thought it was his lucky day.  

Peeking at us after we startled him and he [momentarily] ditched the Kit-Kat and ran up a tree.

Monday afternoon and evening we went to SeaWorld.  I wanted to share just a couple pictures from there.  Kaelyn LOVES the sea lions and seals.  We usually feed them and of course, we have to watch the show.  This time we watched a special sea lion show.  During spring break and summer when they have bigger crowds, they do a special show once a day.  They spoof some of the other SeaWorld shows and rides and it is HILARIOUS!  I laughed so hard that my stomach was hurting.  Kaelyn's favorite part was when they pretended to be riding KRAKEN, one of the park's roller coasters.  The sea lion did everything the two people did.  They leaned way to the left and then to the right, then the guy and the sea lion would look at each other and "yell" like they were scared.  After they got off, the sea lion went over and put his head in a bucket like the roller coaster had made him sick to his stomach.  All three of us got a huge kick out of the show.

Kaelyn had her sea lion pal with her that she saved her money for last year and bought with money she earned from doing chores and stuff.  Of course the sea lion gets to sit right on her lap and "watch" the show.  We were able to get a picture with the cast after the show was over and they made quite a big deal over her stuffed sea lion.

Our last night of camping was COLD (at least for us Floridians) and especially for sleeping outside in a tent.  It was supposed to get all the way down to 40 but I don't think it ever got that cold.  Kevin and I got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and it was only in the low 50s by then.  We all put jackets over our night clothes, socks on our feet and brought every blanket and extra jacket available into the tent in case we needed them.  We all just burrowed down into our sleeping bags and blankets though and stayed plenty warm.

I didn't get a picture of our canoeing on the lake Monday morning unfortunately and I didn't think to take the camera over to the playground any of the times Kay was over there.  We had a great time camping though and the best part was that we all wished we were staying for another night or two.  Kaelyn readily agreed to go camping again and she said that she hoped we could go sometime during the summer!

Saggy, Baggy (more like wobbly) Elephant

One afternoon when I went to pick Kaelyn up from school, her teacher came over to the car and told me that the class was going to be making an "animal museum".  Each student chose which animal they would like to make using 3D items around the house (I guess she didn't want anyone to cop out and draw a picture on poster board.  No worries here since I can't draw worth a dime!)  Kaelyn chose an African elephant.  "That's the homework for this week.  Have fun!" was how Kay's teacher ended the conversation.  :-)  My first reaction was panic honestly.  But within about four minutes of pulling away from car line, the wheels in my brain started turning and I began to get excited as I talked with Kaelyn about how we could make it.  I thought we could get a milk jug and paint it gray and somehow turn it into the body and I figured toilet paper/paper towel rolls would make good legs.  The rest we would figure out as we went.  By the time we got home, we were both pretty excited about the project and an issue was ordered in our household that NO ONE was allowed to throw away any tp rolls once the paper was gone.  :-)  Since we had just opened a new gallon of milk, I didn't thing we could glug it down as fast as we needed to be able to get started so I asked Betty if she thought that they might finish a gallon soon.  (They go through a bit more milk in a week than we do with seven people in the house.)  Luckily they had just finished or were about to finish one so we got our empty milk jug that night.  So here is our somewhat wobbly African elephant from start to finish.

I had Kaelyn do as much as she possibly could.  She painted the milk jug first and I just went through and did some

 touch-ups. 

When she got down to the last side, I spread my fingers out inside the rim of the jug and held it up so she could paint it without the rest of the jug touching anything.

Then I held the rolls for her to paint.

  You can only use so much toilet paper in a couple days no matter how enthusiastically or how often you try to use the restroom for the cause.  :-) Thankfully, we used up a roll of paper towel during that time so I was able to cut that to get two more rolls.

The four "legs" drying.

The "body" drying.

Trying to attach the legs. 

 If you have never tried to get an elephant's legs to stay attached to its body, you have no idea how difficult of a task that is.  "Cause see, if his body gets smashed in a little bit, then it makes some of his legs too short and some too long... and then he wobbles, which isn't a good thing!  :-)  Trust me, I know all about these things now!  :-D

I could never be a doctor/therapist who helps people get fitted for a prosthesis.  I would be like, "Sir, here is you new leg.  I know that it is 4 inches shorter than your other leg but it didn't come out right even though I tried to measure so carefully.  But hey, it's better than no leg right?"  I have serious issues with measuring and cutting and drawing straight lines.  I am totally on a pre-school level with that.  All that to say, we had very uneven "leggage" and the poor thing was quite unstable the first evening.  :-)

I took two Dixie plates and drew ears and cut them out.  I really wasn't sure that idea was going to work because, remember?  HORRIBLE at drawing!  After getting one to look okay, I flipped it over and traced it so that at least the ears would look somewhat proportionate.

The good thing about seven-year-olds is that they don't care if the legs are uneven and wobbly and if the ears don't look great.  They are just excited that a milk jug is looking like an elephant - and that they got to paint lots of stuff with gray paint.  Unfortunately, it wasn't just seven-year-olds seeing it!  :-/  Turns out, all the animals were displayed on the top of a bookshelf in the school library.

I think Kaelyn was the most excited about this - googly eyes. We purposely chose a smaller size because elephants have quite small eyes, especially when you consider how large the rest of the parts of their bodies are.  (We learned that in a book Kay has about elephants.  The elephants in her book do NOT have googly eyes, however.)

She put the eyes on all by herself.  In an astonishing moment where she was not anything like her mother, she stuck them on perfectly - exactly at the same height in proportionate distance from the ears.  :-)

By this point, Kay was so excited.  She was dancing around saying, "This is going to be the best elephant ever!"  :-)

We went to Lowe's and bought a small piece of rope.  I bought the cheapest kind which meant that our choices were red and white or blue and white.  It was actually kind of pretty - for a rope anyway- but I did't take into consideration how hard it would be to hide the color with the paint.  It took going over certain spots several times and even then, you could still see a bit of red.

Kaelyn really enjoyed all the painting - I'm still working on getting gray paint out of a couple of items of clothing - both hers and mine.  We were so enthusiastically gung-ho over the project and the painting that it never crossed either of our minds to put older clothes on or try to cover our clothes.  Oh well, all for the cause I guess.

The trunk - what to use for the trunk.

We wandered the aisles of Lowe's one afternoon looking for the perfect thing for a trunk.  I decided that the aisles that were the most likely to have something were the aisles with plumbing supplies.  So we wandered up and down the aisles looking for various pipes, hoses, etc that were not $20.  (No way a wobbly elephant is going to get a $20 trunk!)  :-)  Well, I looked and Kaelyn stuffed her pals up the giant pvc pipes and let them slide down time and time again.  I finally found the perfect "thing", and by "thing" I do mean "thing" because I had no clue what it was or what it was for.  But I knew it would fit inside the mouth of the milk jug and it was long and it could be painted gray!  :-)

So as I already mentioned, our elephant was quite wobbly.  I was going to just leave it that way at first, probably mostly because I was about "elephanted out" at that point.  But the next day I decided that there was no way that I could leave it like that.  So I performed surgery while Kaelyn painted the rope and trunk.  I'm happy to say, the operation was a success and his limp was so minor when I finished that you wouldn't even know he was once handicapped unless you saw him before.  

I frayed the end of the rope and we attached it.  I thought the legs were difficult but we about never got the rope to stay attached to the hind end.  The combination of the rope already being kind of heavy plus not completely drying normally made it almost impossible.  It finally stuck enough Friday morning for us to get it to school.

The words of Eeyore come to mind, "It's not much of a tail, but I'm kind of attached to it."  All except in our case it was the opposite:  it was an adorable, perfect elephant tail but it wasn't attached to the elephant.

I put the tube thingy trunk in the mouth of the milk jug and it fit in perfectly just tight enough to hold it in place without having to try to stick it on somehow.  All things considered, mostly how NOT crafty or creative I am, it turned out okay.  Not amazing but you could tell that it was an elephant at least and Kaelyn was just thrilled!

January Days

Nothing exciting or spectacular here in the next couple posts.  Just snapshots from our life in January.  :-)

This was at an Applebee's somewhere along the way between Massena, New York and Hobe Sound, Florida.  :-)

Both when we were at Kevin's parents and also when we were at my parents, we boxed up some presents and things and shipped them ahead of us.  :-)  The first ones arrived in Hobe Sound before we got back.  I'm frankly not sure whether to be annoyed or impressed with the U. S. Postal Service.  The box in the picture above was so gouged up that on this one side if you pulled the cardboard back a little bit, you could see the stuff inside the box.  It's amazing that they can be so rough on packages that a box shows up like this.  Furthermore, you would thing that maybe someone that handled the box along the way would have seen it and tried to secure it with tape.  However, on the other hand, it is simply amazing that the boxes were so badly battered but NOTHING had come out or was missing.  That's why I say that I'm not sure whether to be frustrated that the boxes arrived in this shape or impressed that they still arrived and had everything in them.  

This one also had a few gouges in one side but the biggest thing was that top flaps had come more than halfway untaped.  There were 2 or 3 strips of tape across and then a couple of strips across the sides originally. The tape was pulled back, mangled, or totally missing. But once again, it somehow held together and everything was accounted for and in good condition.

Kay looking cute as always at The Barrel - Cracker Barrel that is.  :-)

Some nice man at the next table over saw me taking pictures of Kaelyn and he got up and came over and volunteered to get one of both of us.  I was glad he had because I like the picture he got.

Kaelyn says, "Mom, look!  When we stop at a light, can you take a picture of me?"  :-)  Of course with such hilarity, I HAVE to get a picture.  :-)

(She's so much her mother's daughter, only with a seven-year-old sense of humor.)

One evening shortly after we got back home, Kevin got Kaelyn's new dollhouse out and put together.  It is so cool!  I think I was about as excited for it to get put together as Kaelyn was.  :-)

I was in the other room part of the time Kevin was setting it up. Kaelyn gave Kevin the dad to play with and this is what I overheard:  [spoken in an over-exaggerated low voice] "Well, I guess I'm going to go to work now.  I wish I had a car so that I wouldn't have to walk to work but oh well."

(And yes, that was Kevin not Kaelyn)  :-)

I absolutely LOVE this picture!!!

My two favorite people in the world.

January Days 2

More snapshots from last month.

The first full week that we were back from our Christmas trip, I was a little bit "blah" from leaving everyone and being back where it was hot and definitely not wintry.  It took Kaelyn a bit to get back into her routine also.  The Friday after the first full week back , I decided it would be good for us to get some fresh air rather than just sit around at home so we went to the park after school was over.  It was a beautiful day in the low 70's so I decided I really should stop being mopey about the warm weather.  :-)

Rudolph is one of her current favorite pals.

After Kaelyn finished on the playground, she suggested that we walk all the way around the park.  There is a huge field, some trees, and even a butterfly garden on the property that the park sits on.  It makes a big circle so we walked all the way around.  When we walked under the trees, Kaelyn decided she would really like to climb one of the trees.  She said, "But it's probably not a good idea is it?"  Now the responsible mother part of me should have said, "No, it's not safe at all.  You could fall and break your arm."  But having spent a good part of my childhood up in trees (and probably taking way more risks than I should have that probably would have given MY mom fits had she known), I really didn't have the heart or desire to to not let her experience being up in a tree and feeling like you are on top of the world.  So under my careful supervision and with my help she got up on to THE LOWEST BRANCH of the tree.  :-)  She's not quite as daring as I was at that age and her fearfulness of falling was probably actually a good thing.  I don't think I had enough sense as a kid to realize what would happen if I fell from some of the heights I climbed.

(But I'm still here so you can breathe again Mama!)  :-)

I didn't have the real camera and we hadn't really planned to do a photo shoot so I didn't get any outstanding pictures but there are still some cute ones.

This made us laugh and laugh and whenever Kaelyn or I see the picture, we laugh all over again.  The picture was not altered in anyway though it looks like it could have been photoshopped.  For some reason, the angle at which she was holding her head and the way she had her hand under her chin made it look like her head was just glued on to the picture of her body.  I didn't really notice the way it looked when I was taking the picture on my phone but as soon as we looked at the pictures and we saw this one, we both were getting cracked up!  :-D

We continued around to the little butterfly garden and enjoyed looking at the different flowers and plants, watching the squirrels play, and goofing off for some more pictures.

Look to the left...

look to the right...

heads out...

...and heads in.   :-)   :-)   :-)