Weekend Review: Quality Time with Chris & 3 Goals Accomplished

After spending 6 hours learning all about having a baby, I sent Mister the following text message on our 5-minute ride home:

"Your adventure, should you choose to accept it, is to pack your bags and get ready to head back out on the road. You will need to pack a bag including the following: change of clothes [nothing fancy!], swimsuit, toothbrush, flip-flops, older tennis shoes, and your pillow. Hopefully that's everything! Will you join me?!"

*I later realized that I put nothing in there about needing shorts to sleep in. Oops. Good thing our tent was secluded!*

He turned to me, smiled, and said I'll join ya!

Had this statement not be made, this weekend would've went to the toilet real quick!

Chris and I packed our bags and we were off in my preloaded car. I told him our ETA was about 40 minutes, but I didn’t really know because I’d been there maybe once and he didn’t ask many questions. [He’s much easy—better—to surprise than me! I’d been playing 20 questions the whole way!

Ten minutes into the trip: “Oh crap!"

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to pack something!” What’s that important “something” that I forgot… butter of course! J

As I thought a little more, I realized that I may have needed to pack a rubber mallet to drive in the tent stakes but didn’t want to ask because it would’ve given it away. [We ended up not needed a mallet.]

A quick $2.61 for butter and a bag of ice and we were back on the road.

It wasn’t until we pulled into Van Buren’s KOA that Chris knew what we were doing for the weekend! I patted myself on the back for this secret planning accomplishment! After parking, registering, realizing that everyone there hated their jobs and their kids, we were off to set up our campsite.

Later we would have to return to said hatey workers to buy wood from their empty wood storage which reiterated their passion for the job!

Campsite

 A quick tent set-up and change into our bathing suits, we were off to the swimming area. This pond likely had more chemicals and we were surprised our suits didn’t turn teal so we decided not to go under, but wading chest deep was refreshing and relaxing! They also had a big inflatable slide as well as a "spinning log", but you had to rent their life jackets to use them and it was pretty kid-infested attraction anyways. After relaxing in the water and on the "beach" we journeyed back to our campsite.

Snackin' on a pretzel after wading in the teal water.

For supper we made pizza pudgy pies. All carbon aside they were good! I think I should have taken some PAM along to help out the sticking to the iron and burning factor, but I thought butter is all we'd need. That's a downfall of trying to replicate what you did when you were 12. You don't always remember the details!

I had packed apple pie filling to make dessert pudgy pies, but because of the trickiness of preventing burning that we couldn't quite master, we stuck we the good ol' camping standard, s'mores. Toasted to perfection, they were delish! As we sat around our lil fire, Chris enjoyed a pipe or two and I decided to working on crossing another thing off my list. Borrowing his knife I went to carve my initials in a tree. It was difficult to find a tree in our little area with smooth enough bark to do this, and it ended up not being the prettiest of carvings, but I'm am amateur when it comes to vandalism so it sufficed!

Lighting his pipe, which was much more
successful than the last time he attempted.

Not beautiful, but it counts. :)

 We decided to call it a night and retreated to our tent for the evening. Isn't it amazing how the sun dictates your sleeping and waking when you don't have electricity?! I had borrowed a friend's air mattress [ours took electricity to pump and they had a battery powered one] so sleeping was quite enjoyable. [One question that Chris did ask on the way up was if we'd be sleeping on a mattress that night. I told him I was, but I didn't know about him! This confused him a bit which was perfect! Later he realized why I answered that way.] We rested well and I dreamt about being on a WWF tag-team with Hulk Hogan against his evil twin and another guy. Quite a night. :)

The next morning we rose with the sun, trekked to the mosquito infested hole in the ground toilets, and then enjoyed delicious banana nut muffins cooked over the fire from Meijers. I still have a scar on my finger from the one time I remember making breakfast while camping, so I decided to go with a safer option! After devouring these muffins, we took a little walk around the campgrounds. We were drawn to a jumping pillow [never heard of it prior to this weekend] and saw a handful of kids jumping on it. We walked over intrigued, but I assumed it was a kids only kind of thing. As the kids got off and we got closer, a lady said that she had just turned it off, but asked if we wanted to jump because she could easily turn it back on. After some debating back and forth, the next thing we knew we were kangaroos hopping all over that thing!

I didn't have my camera and don't have Chris' near
to get the pic off his, but this is pretty much
the same thing!

After jumping to our hearts calves' content, we headed back to our site. [Sidenote: As we were leaving and she turned it off again, there was a 3-year old and a 13-year old that came over to jump. "Oh, I'm sorry you can't jump. I've already turned it off!" I felt bad that she turned it back on for us but denied the ones it was likely designed for!] We played several games of Crazy 8 Countdown and then decided weren't really hungry enough to build a fire to cook lunch and both of us were more than ready not to sit in a pool of our own sweat so we would go ahead and pack everything up.

Chris won all but one game of Crazy 8 Countdown.
I let him win since this was kind of like
his birthday celebration. ;)

 After a quick tear down of our campsite and packing of the car, we were homeward bound. In the air conditioning! It felt ah-mazing! Since we returned to Lima early enough in the afternoon [church was actually just getting out as we drove by] we decided to head to the mall to check a couple things out.

On Friday, my momma-cita had asked me to pick up her eyeglasses from JCPenney's and in doing so I saw a "gazebo" [canopy] discounted up on the second floor. Chris and I had talked about wanting to make our back yard a little more livable and have plans in the works for what we want to do to it next summer, but this gazebo seemed like a good option for now! So I looked at it a bit and did some online review research when I got home. Then when our mail came Friday we received a coupon for JCPenney's for 20% off if you used your JCP Credit Card and 15% anything else. Every have a feeling that a sale was made just for you! Yeah, I was feeling that way. So this is what we were going to check out and see if Chris thought it was as much of a good deal as I did!

He agreed.

At checkout they asked if I had a JCP Credit Card, which I did from when I purchased all our bridal parties' attire there over 2 years ago, but I was pretty confident that it had since been cancelled. I am glad that it had because my re-opening it, we were able to save another 10%. We left we our new gazebo canopy saving $398 overall! Cha-ching!

It only took about an hour to set it all up and now we have our own little backyard oasis. Okay not really but we have a back patio that we will actually use! It doesn't fit perfectly this year, but after our planned renovations next year, it'll fit much better!

Back Patio Before

Back Patio After
It has a mosquito netting that can be pulled around it.

Now I have a bit more motivation to pull all the weeds back there so we'll see how that goes!

So in additional to learning quite a bit about the birthing process, having a great getaway time with Mister, and bettering our home a bit I was also able to cross 3 things off my 101 in 1001 list.

40. Plan a surprise get-away with/for Chris.

57. Carve my name initials on a tree.

60. Go camping--somewhere other than our backyard. 

The bad news is I had to start over for Goal #21 even though I was on day 11 of 14. Drats!!