Back in early April, some friends invited us to join them for a group camping trip over Memorial Day Weekend. The end of May seemed like a really long way off at the time, so we accepted, thinking that we had plenty of time to prepare Adelaida for camping before the trip. Before we knew it, of course, the weekend had arrived and neither Adelaida nor Dale and I were prepared!
We packed up some camping gear on Saturday morning and headed out to the campground, planning to stay one or two nights, depending on how the first night went.
The campground was HOT (actually, everything in New Mexico has been hot the past few weeks), but we had a great time camping. There were seven families total, all from our MOMS group, and the kids played together, families hiked together, groups went down to play in the creek together, and the entire campground ate and sat around the campfire together.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from the trip (thanks to Shannon for several of them!).
One family in our group brought their dog -- a very well-behaved lab named Max. Adelaida loved Max and often toddled off after him. Fortunately, he didn't stray far from the campground, and he was really good around kids.
Adelina, Duncan, and Adelaida play together on the blanket.
Another shot of Adelaida, Adelina, and Duncan.
Adelaida thought that the pavers edging the campsites were just her size and loved to sit on them! Here, she convinced her daddy to sit down with her ... aren't they cute!
Adelina and Kalli became great friends on this camping trip and spent almost an hour walking up and down the campsite lane, holding hands ...
... while their older brothers (Enzo and Kieran) ran up and down the campsite lane with their trucks!
Adelaida also found a friend on this camping trip. Ria is a calm two-and-a-half-year-old girl who we don't see much of at the MOMS events -- Ria goes to school three days a week while her mom works, and Adelaida has been going to school three, four, and now five days a week while I work. Between our two work schedules, we hadn't really gotten to know Ria and her family very well prior to this trip. But the two girls latched on to each other right away and were almost inseparable! This is a picture of Adelaida and Ria, sitting on the edge of one of the campsites. It was so much fun to watch them play together on this trip!
One of the families brought a soccer ball, which Dale was immediately drawn to. He played soccer with Adelaida for a bit, which she found hilarious. I just love to hear her laugh!
Ria decided to join Adelaida's team in soccer, which didn't really give the girls an advantage, but they had fun anyway.
We did go for one short hike, up the mountain next to our campground. Adelaida rode in the backpack, of course.
This is a view from our hiking destination, looking out over the campground (near the river).
Turning counter-clockwise 90 degrees showed us another beautiful view.
We made it through the trip with only two mildly scraped knees. Amazingly, Adelaida didn't cry at all when she fell!
In planning this camping trip, we knew that Adelaida doesn't sleep well in the same room with us, so thought we'd put her to sleep in the back of the car while we were in the tent. We'd leave the windows cracked so we could hear her, and we'd all sleep better. That great idea was foiled when we arrived at the campground and realized the car parking spots were really far away from the tents. So, we all slept in the tent together, and didn't have quite enough sleeping bags or blankets for all three of us. It got kind of cold at night, and we ended up with Adelaida sleeping on my chest, sharing the sleeping bag with me. Not ideal, but we did get some sleep. Unfortunately, we didn't get quite enough sleep that night, so left the next day, with plans to go camping again this summer.
Caltech is a very dynamic campus, so one of the first things offered Friday morning was an architectural overview of the campus, with a focus on new buildings (several buildings were new to us, ten years removed from Caltech, while almost every building was new to the Techers who graduated in 1940 and 1945!). The session started with a talk about the different buildings, then dispersed into small groups for an architectural tour. Please remember that Adelaida was about ten hours behind on sleep at this point, so took a nice long nap on my shoulder during the talk! Our architectural tour group was small -- the tour guide, Dale, me, Adelaida, and our good friend from college Karen, who we hadn't seen in ten years but our friendship picked up right where we left it ten years ago!
We thought about it for only a few minutes before deciding to go. After all, if we really were old, the best way to hang on to our youth would be to spend time with friends from our past, in the city of our past!
We've done so many fun things with Adelaida recently that I want to share with you all. This post is about her first Easter Egg Hunt, back in March. The Easter Egg Hunt was for a playgroup that Adelaida has been involved with since she was about one month old, hosted by one of the moms in the playgroup. This is a fun playgroup of about fifteen kids very close to Adelaida's age -- the oldest is about 20 months old and the youngest are about 14 months old, and Adelaida is right in the middle at seventeen months old.
After the obligatory adorable baby photo shoot, the kids hunted their eggs to various degrees -- some kids were excited about picking up their eggs and placing them in the buckets, while other kids found the eggs and looked at them, but weren't really interested in picking them up. Adelaida found the first two eggs she came across, picked them both up, then walked around the rest of the hunt with those two eggs in her hands. No basket required and she was perfectly happy!
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