Fall Break

Nathan with a butterfly

Aaron making an amazing breakfast!

A break in the rain.

The falls.

One thing I love about being in the Vail School District is our 3 week fall break. Unfortunately, the high schools only get a 2 week break, so Aaron and Nathan get to go back to school on Monday. Fall break is the time when I try to get a few things done, i.e. doctors appointments, etc. I saw the optometrist yesterday, my mammogram is tomorrow, and I still need to make appointments to get our kittens fixed.

One thing on my fall break list is to read!! I've already read 4 books and am waiting for 2 more to come in the mail. I read books 9 and 10 of the Tennis Shoes series (by Chris Heimerdinger) and hopefully book 11 will be here in the next couple days.

Another item on my fall break list is to plant new flowers in our containers on our patio. All the previous flowers died and looked pretty bad, but I didn't want to take the dead flowers out yet, because I didn't want our kittens using the containers as a litter box and also, I wanted some pine cones to help keep the kittens out of the containers. So, finally today at Wal-Mart, they had some good flowers, which I bought. I planted in 2 of our containers and will finish the other 2 tomorrow. We went camping last weekend, and I insisted that we get pine cones, so I put the pine cones around the flowers, so hopefully, my flower containers won't become litter boxes for our kittens.

Speaking about camping. We had an amazing camping trip last weekend. We went to a place called Hell's Gate Wilderness and camped next to a creek in the pine trees. Friday, after setting up camp, we hiked up the creek to some falls. The rocks along the creek were amazing! There wasn't too much water in the creek, so there wasn't a lot of water going over the falls. It was a cool little hike. We took the road back to our campground.

On Saturday, Jim, Aaron and Nathan hiked to a place called Hell's Hole. (Jim and I hiked there over 18 years ago and ended up having an unplanned survival hike.) I was also going to hike it, but once we got there, I had a bad feeling about it, and decided not to. I wasn't feeling 100% and didn't sleep well the previous night, so I wasn't sure if I could do it, or I would really slow my family down. So, I went back to the campground to read and take a nap. When they got back, Jim said that it was probably a good thing that I didn't go. It was a tough hike. They did really well, and played in the creek at Hell's Hole for about 1 hour.

When we left, there was a 10% chance of rain. Well, while we were about to eat dinner, the sky broke loose and we received some good rain. We ate dinner in the Tahoe and never made the Cherry Chocolate Cake that we were going to make. It actually rained for quite awhile, it took a break, and started to rain again when we went to bed. We woke up to a very sunny and beautiful morning. We took our time breaking camp, drove home and arrived around 6:30. We had a great trip!

Next week, I get to try to finish my fall break list and get back into the school mode. Wish me luck! (I just added one thing to my list...try to figure out how to get the pictures in the text, not all at the top!)