It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Camping, I love it.  It's a lot of work.  But I love being outdoors with no other obligations but doing camping things.  It tooks us until our youngest was 1 to attempt camping again and we started with yurts.  I love yurts.  They have heat and light and are dry when it rains.  And our girls haven't been ready for tent camping because of the darkness in the middle of the night.  But we have been working on it and our next trip is all in a tent.
But back to this camping trip.  This is one of the hardest trips we have ever done.  For lots of reasons.
Including: Who was coming/who wasn't coming.  The numbers changed almost daily and even while we were there, kept changing.
My son woke up the night before we were leaving with an earache.  Add trip to Urgent Care and pharmacy on my list of things to do before heading out. 
I forgot tons of stuff.  Clearly it was stuff we could do without but a little bit of an inconvenience at times.
It rained.  For almost an entire day.  It was very wet.
A short easy hike turned into a 6 mile difficult hike with our 3 young kids, me wearing shoes that were too small (although at least they were hiking shoes) and no snacks.  Yep, 4 hours of hard walking with no snacks for the kiddos. 
Accidents at the beach.  You really would think I would know better than to go anywhere without changes of clothing, but apparently I have not learned that lesson after being a parent for 8 years.
Did I mention it rained?  And yes we had 2 canopies, one of which leaked.
Oh and someone taking our meat?  Or a raccoon.  We can't decide which but it was creepy either way having something go through our cooler in the middle of the night.
My husband at one point described this trip as "a character building trip".  Yep,  character building for sure.
Fortunately, that is only half the story.  Remember all that rain I talked about?  At one point my kids were sitting around the fire in the rain, chatting happily like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And the hike?  Oh there was plenty of complaining throughout but there was also teamwork, and lots of walking without complaining, and no one sat down and cried when we realized after 3 miles that we had to turn around and go back 3 miles, back through the mud and the prickly bushes that overhung the path, and the logs to climb over and no food.  They just did it.  And maybe even enjoyed parts of it.
And we played games in our nicely warm yurt while the rain fell.
And my kids had fun.  Throughout it all, there was very little arguing.  They picked flowers and walked the dog and ran on the beach and roasted hot dogs and got dirty.  And it was great!
And our friend left to get baptized with her nephew.  And when my 4 year old had me explain what being baptized was.  And how you have to accept Jesus into your heart.  She said "I want to do that".  And so in the pouring down rain, with just me and my 2 girls sitting in a yurt, my baby accepted Jesus as her Saviour.  And I understood why this trip was so hard.  For there was a battle going on.  A battle for her soul.

And it turns out, it really was the best of times.

June

Wow, I cannot believe it is June.  It sure doesn't feel like June.  It feels like February.  Really.  It was 56 degrees today.  I had my heat on.  Brr.
May flew by and I enjoyed it.  I really did.  It was a carefree sort of month in a lot of ways.  My house is a mess to prove it but that is okay.  Sometimes you just need downtime.  I even read a couple of books.  Yep.  2 days this month I read.  2 books.  You can probably figure out that nothing else got done that day but reading.  Oh well,  reading makes me happy and relaxed.
I am rambling I know.  So it is June and back to my goals.  I skipped May and that was nice.  But I need to get back on track.  Summer can be lots of fun but also stressful with 3 kids at home whining that they are bored.  Yes, my kids have now picked up on that lovely word.  I have a plan though for that.  I am going to make a list of things they can do when they are "bored" and I hope it puts an end to that word fairly quickly.  I am sure there will be more fun things they can figure out to do than pick up dog poop for instance. 
But my goal for June is to declutter.  Oh how I need to declutter.  I have too much stuff everywhere.  In my closet, in the kids' rooms, it's even staring at me on my desk as I type this.  Too much stuff!
And I want to have a garage sale so what better time to declutter than right before a garage sale.
That's it, that's my goal.  Something simple and hopefully doable. 
That might mean no more reading for me for a couple of weeks though:-)