Claire's 1st Birthday

Another Trip to Camp

This weekend we were up at camp to celebrate Claire's 1st birthday party. The party was at a park in Lock Haven, PA on Saturday. Andy and I packed up the kids and drove up to camp Friday night. This trip up was better than the last trip over Memorial Day. There were no incidents of motion sickness and no road kill and no rain. We had the rainstorm just before leaving on Friday. We had just got the car packed up and were going to round up the kids when it started pouring buckets and then there was the hail. Andy thought it was something to see ice falling from the sky in mid-July.

It was late when we got to camp (just after 9) and Sadie was ready for bed. Her second front tooth on the bottom seems to be coming in and causing her some pain. Caleb on the other hand was ready to go after being cooped up in the car for so long. He was awake the entire trip! He would get quiet and we would think that he was asleep, then you would hear "whoa, da-da, oooh, whoa" (that's the best translation that I can come up with) We have no idea what he was saying but he was happy.

Since it was so late, we just decided to get the kids into bed and then wait for Jason and Lindsay to get there. Both of the munchkins went down fairly easy and slept good through the night.

We got up around 7:30 Saturday morning and worked on getting ready to go to the party. Most of the time was spent trying to convince Caleb to wear pants. I don't know where this all came from but he was not happy with the idea of wearing any pants Saturday or Sunday. We did get him dressed and got Sadie dressed and they were able to play a bit before we had to get into the car to drive to the party.

The party was at a nice little park in Lock Haven. There was plenty of room to run around and a playground nearby. There was also a lake or river (not sure which it was) with lots of boats and jet skis to watch. That became the distraction when Caleb would get upset with anything at the party. There were two other little kids there that were friends of Sean and Emily...2 1/2 yr old Olivia and 4 yr old Gavin (I think). They spent a lot of time kicking the soccer ball around with Jason. Olivia seemed to really like Caleb and kept trying to give him hugs. He, of course, would try and run away from her. Sadie had fun being passed around to all the different people who wanted to hold her. She didn't even get strange since there were many people that she didn't know.

Claire was very cute in her little party dressed and was fun to watch eating her birthday cake. She definitely ate more cake than Caleb did at his first party. Then we watched the presents. Caleb and Olivia were both interested in testing out the new toys for her. Caleb got frustrated though, when her new puppy (same as one he has) wouldn't play the songs just right because it was set on demo mode. We had to hide the puppy and later he got very upset when he saw it being packed away in the car to go home to Claire's house.

Andy and I left the party while everyone else helped to clean up. Both Sadie and Caleb were exhausted and we thought we might be able to get them to nap a little before my parents got home. They each slept on the way home but were both awake when we got back to camp and weren't interested in napping. They had lots of fun playing with g'ma and g'pa Mattock when they got back to camp and Andy and I were able to throw the frisbee around for a bit ourselves.

Saturday night was a bit more difficult. Caleb came down with a really bad stomach ache and there didn't seem to be anything that we could do to comfort him. He refused to drink anything and seemed to want to sleep but just couldn't go down. We thought he was asleep around 10 but then he woke up crying again. G'ma took him out on the porch for a bit and rocked him to sleep. Andy and I got ready for bed thinking that one of us was going to have to stay up all night with him. He woke up when we carried him back into the house so I thought we might try having him sleep in bed with us- mostly to keep him from keeping everyone else awake all night. We settled down to sleep at about 11. Caleb laid down between Andy and I and seemed happy to relax and suck his thumb. That lasted all off about 10 minutes. Then he was unhappy with the blankets, so we had to take the comforter off and just have the sheet. Then he didn't like Andy's pillow, so Andy had to move that away from him. Things settled down again. Then he started talking, just babbling away like nothing was ever wrong. Finally, he sat up to talk to us- and I said, that's it and took him up to his bed. He went down without any fuss and slept 'til morning. When I got back into bed, Andy and I just laughed at the whole thing.

Sunday morning, we got up and played some more. G'pa, Andy and I took Caleb to a nearby playground to play a bit. Caleb liked getting to ride in G'pa's new big truck. The playground was tough though. The jungle gym was hard for him to walk on and he was a little afraid of the slide but he still had fun walking and watching the campers and people fishing in the creek. After that, we came back and waited for Sadie to wake up from her nap so that we could pack up and get on the road.

It was a little after 1 when we left and Caleb quickly fell asleep and slept almost the entire way home. The boy was thoroughly worn out from the weekend but we all had lots of fun.