Campfire Club cabining weekend

[Hey look at this return to blogging with zero preamble. Zero point five preambles maybe.]

This weekend, due to a still-infirmed husband, I took the kids alone up into the mountains for Ollie's Campfire USA troop camping (cabining) trip. We took over much (but not all, unfortunately for the others) of the William Heise County Park campsite cabins in Julian. These are log cabins with wooden slab bunks. The only amenity is a propane heater inside, which has two settings: Off and Inferno. 

(dinner on the porch)

We shared a cabin with friends who were also temporarily fatherless. 

(Ollie, age 6.75, [Guthrie], Edith, age 4.25)

It is lovely up here. The weather has been idyllic. A little too mild, in my opinion. I wanted an extremeish winter experience but got highs in the 50s.

This morning, Edith washed the dishes with Sarah while the boys participated in what we can relatively accurately describe as Feral Play, and I got to sneak off on the adjacent trails for a lovely but hilly run. 

(meh, that's exactly where I turned around. Any other day I would have loved a hoppy hurdly creek crossing but the shower possibilities were iffy upon my return to camp and I didn't want to end up with yellow fever or something).

And then, back at camp, we turned around and hiked nearly the exact same trail with all the kids. Some of it, I spent carrying Edith (pushin' 40lbs) so that was...leggy. 

Back at camp: an addictive and therapeutic introduction to soap carving. I made sure to call it whittling. Ollie and I discussed Old Sneep, a very special and crotchety character from Robert McCloskey's "Lentil" story. His main purpose in the story is to whittle, mutter, and do some pivotal lemon sucking at the book's climax. Definitely check it out.

(I monopolized Edie's soap whittling and then let her etch it to her fancy after I was done)

(This is the sweet face of a photogenic six year old carving a beer bottle into soap)

Edith then took an artistic photograph of her pee. And to occupy her later, I let her tool around in Snapseed with the picture. This happened. 

(I'm pretty sure she was just scrolling all the levels back and forth on every single option. There were also neon green versions. I like the contrast, don't you?)

Ollie then got to build his own "stamp box." God knows what it's for. I think I missed a meeting. Ollie did great, practically doing everything alone while his sister whined next to us. 

After a really fucking crazy group dinner and camp fire, we hiked down to the meadow to stargaze. This was not the peaceful, observant experience we had imagined. It was lord of the flies chaos, except for two seconds of coerced darkness and silence. The stars, though, were crisp and abundant anyway.

And, because I'm in a toasty one room cabin with five people and the temperature is steadily dropping outside, I have very few other options than to go to bed early myself. Actually just writing that sentence made me realize obvs I could play minesweeper on my phone for a while. Good night from the mountains. 

[look. That wasn't difficult. Blogging isn't *that* tedious].