Labor Day Campout

I hereby motion that we get every Monday off. Having Monday off is like a special little surprise tacked onto an already great gift. Like, "oh, tomorrow's Monday - but surprise! it's actually another Saturday!" Fabulous.

Sunday after church we drove down to Payson Canyon and enjoyed a laid-back campout at Maple Lake. It's hard to pinpoint a single favorite moment from our Labor Day celebration - Ben gorging on the Pop Tarts he bought at the store on our way out of town, Sam running around our campsite nonstop playing Halo games in his imagination, Ben and Sasha fighting over who gets to cook their hotdog on the 8-foot "stick" they found (answer: neither of them)... but I think that my favorite moment has to be Sasha singing a rousing, "this place is full of flies" song in the bathroom over and over again. Nothing commemorates the pit-toilet experience like a theme song.

Before we headed down the canyon on Monday, we stopped at The Grotto, another local hike on my unofficial list of "hikes we have to take or else we're bad people." You'll be glad to know that this hike went a jillion times better than our ill-fated Dry Creek hike and I did notice that the children were sure to ask me multiple times if I really knew where this hike was. Fair question, I can't blame them for asking.

We had a really great little hikelet up to The Grotto. Apparently six-tenths of a mile is just the right distance for our family :)

Here's Ben's description of our walk:

Some Boy Scouts, I guess, made some bridges. They're made by logs. I went over each one four times. It was awesome.

We went up on this giant cliff. And then we could get up to The Grotto and we could just stand right by it. It's not that hard to get there. Running the way down was fun.

Definitely a great end to a fun long weekend. Now I just have to figure out how to get paid to take every Monday off...