Its All White...: camping

Our first family camping trip (legit roughing it- tents, no showers, and campfire cooked meals) was a success! I was as nervous as I was excited to see how Jayme would do sleeping in a tent AND still potty training (3 day method has turned into just over a week... possibly I started too soon, but we can't go back now!)... God answered some prayers and other than the chilly factor the first night (which we reconfigured the tent to be less chilly the second night) and a couple poo-in-the-panties accidents later- Jayme did so well and LOVED it! It only took us 3 hours (including time to stop for some Del Taco) to get from our house to El Capitan (and we left at 5pm on a Friday!!)... Grampa and Bebba weren't so lucky... they had close to a 5 hour drive each (Ryan did some course mapping and we took a scenic back route to bypass most of LA traffic, and I would take that route again even if LA was traffic free!) It was almost as if we were no longer in Southern California once you get off the main freeways! I could almost live up there in beautiful nowhere land, California! Anyway- back to the actual camping trip... we arrived as the sun was just about down for the night, and we quickly devised a plan to set up our new ~~circus~~ tent (note, if we had any prior practice assembling it, we might have had it up within 10-15 minutes... not an hour and 30 minutes later!). Once all of our ~~crap~~ camping essentials were unloaded and semi-situated in the tent, we put the Nugget to bed, and enjoyed the clean air and campfire annnnnd some fancy pink wine in fancy plastic wine cups... highlight of night one- for me personally it was the gorgeous drive to a beautiful destination with little to no traffic on a Friday... for everyone else the highlight was probably laughing hysterically at my attempt to use Jayme's princess potty chair because I am too girly to squat and too lazy/chicken to walk to the dark bathrooms at 11:30 at night (note- 2 liters of water and 3 glasses of wine is too much liquid for one little bladder!)
annnnyway... the next morning we woke up around 6:30 (for some reason it doesn't seem that early when your camping). Operation coffee and cocktails commenced (anything goes when you're roughing it!) and we soon had bellies full of eggs and bacon and banana nut muffins... While Ryan enjoyed some solitary shore fishing (the fish had other plans), the rest of us enjoyed watching Jayme make friends with neighboring campers and exploring the campgrounds... after a lazy afternoon of attempting to nap in the heat, we headed to the shore shop for some ice cream before embarking on a most awesome walk around El Capitan's rocky point and the trails that surround the campground... truly one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in California! Night two included campfire cones (can't go camping without a little something from pinterest!), ribs and tri tip on the campfire grill and quality fam time... we missed having Stace there though... next time!
Sad as we were to leave on Sunday, it was nice to be home (within 2 hours!) and have the day to unpack, SHOWER, and unwind before the week started back up. Things we learned from this trip: don't drink alot of liquid after 8 or you'll be forced to use a toddler potty chair or squat, sleeping bags are a must for all three of us, leave 2/3 of the clothing at home, invest in a french press for the next time, skuuzi's are incredible, bring more underwear for potty training toddler, and invest in decent chairs to sit around camp...

toddler size headlamp = legit little camper

Grampa gettin his jam on at breakfast

Bebba & Nugget time (gotta soak it up before Bebba leaves us all for Australia ;-)

"Peee-Pa" time (not sure how she went from "gampa" to "peee-pa")

enjoying her uncle Alex visit

Nugget being Nugget...

Ryan getting his morning fish on... grampa going in the ocean (had to get this on camera to prove it actually happened)... and a pretty butterfly along our walk (i chose not to stop long enough to capture a photo of the skunk on that same trail)