Backyard camp out

My summer vacation is just about up and I was thinking about how I need to catch the ol' bloggy up on our summer happenings.  In early June, we decided we needed to get the tent out and finally clean last years grime and dust out of it before our 2 upcoming camping trips. We were pretty sure the kids were going to do fine on our trips but we also knew they would be totally stoked to camp out in our back yard! So camp out we did! We made it a full day of fun too.  First we spent time cleaning out the tent really well, then played in it after it was dry.

Later, Allie and I went to the store for some supplies like Hershey bars, marshmallows, and graham crackers. We ended up getting a few extra items to make some things I saw on Pinterest. One of them was marshmallow shooters.  Such a fun and eaasssy project. Seriously entertained my kids for a full 30 minutes. And that's saying something! We cut the bottoms off of paper cups and balloons. Then we stretched balloons over the widest part of the cup and tied off the balloon.  Last step, put in a marshmallow, stretch the balloon and let 'er fly! Boy do those suckers fly too! I only gave them one marshmallow to use over and over (until it became to sticky) to make it easier to keep track of. When you have an ant problem like mine, you take no risks.

For dinner, we barbequed of course! And ate outside in true camping fashion. The kids had the tried and true camping favorite: hot dogs! 

And the adults had steak! Yum! Look at that, Jason even cut my meat for me :) Love him!

After dinner, we played this fun game called "Squirrels Scramble". There are no pictures of this because I was too busy playing, but I do want to remember how to play...in case we ever forget :) Basically, each player is a 'squirrel' and one person is the 'squirrel catcher'.  Each squirrel is to pick a tree to stand at. We don't have trees in my backyard, so we improvised with lawn chairs.  When the squirrel catcher yells "Squirrels Scramble!" all of the squirrels run to find a new tree (must be a different tree), while the squirrel catcher tries to catch the squirrels. If you are caught (tagged), you become the new squirrel catcher. Our kids just ate it up! And our dog did not know what to make of it. We must have tripped over her a thousand times, which made it more fun! We played until we were good and sweaty and then made s'mores. No fire pit here, so being the improvisers that we are, we used the bbq.

 

We all ran inside to wash off the sweat and chocolate and slip into our cozy jammies.  Then we *tried* to make glow bottles for the kids but it just didn't turn out right. They looked NOTHING like this and leaked all over, even after hot gluing the lid on.

The glitter clumped up and the water leaked, so we just tossed them. I had fun taking low light pictures of them though before we tossed them.

We ended up just handing the kids the glow sticks and saving the rest for a future camping trip. After that, we retired to our tent to watch a movie off of Netflix. We watched Rango, but never did finish it. We all fell asleep pretty quickly. Our dog slept right outside our tent door all night and protected us from.... skunks? Opossums? lizards? That's about as wild as it gets in my back yard.
The next morning, we woke up bright and early and got ready to go to Disneyland! The fun just never ends here :)