Mother's Day and More

Jen had a wonderful Mother's Day.  Perhaps the best ever!  The day started with the kids jumping into bed with us, wishing a Happy Mother's Day and showing their love.  We had a homemade version of Kneader's french toast. Yummy!  After breakfast, the kids excitedly bestowed their gifts upon Mom.  They know that Mom likes to read, and likes when they draw things, so they decided to make books for her.  You can see a few of Jen's favorite pages below...
Kyle prepared a delicious dinner of grilled salmon and rice pilaf, followed by a delectable chocolate fondue with plenty of treats to dip.

 Here is the cover page of their books.  Ethan came up with the title of his all by himself: "The Book by Ethan."

 The book was filled with the kids favorite things to do with Mom.  Here we are parachuting to Disneyland. (this is what happens when the kid watches the movie Hook earlier in the day - we're just glad we all had parachutes...)

 At the park...

 And here's Mom and Brooklyn.  This is the best penmanship Brooklyn has ever shown. It's been hard to teach her since she is left-handed.

Kyle, Ethan and Brooklyn went camping a week ago, and Mom stayed home with a cold. It was weird to have the house so quiet, but she had a lovely time reading.  

Kyle found a quiet little campground by a little river.  After getting the tent set up and campfire roaring, we had a yummy dinner of hamburgers and Sun Chips.

Then we got all set up for s'mores.  Unfortunately, Kyle left the graham crackers home, so we just roasted marshmallows and had squares of chocolate. The kids were very good at keeping their marshmallows out of the fire.  Brooklyn was so good, her marshmallow hardly even got warm.

After dessert, we  got out the guitars and sang "You've got a Friend in Me" around the campfire. 

We started getting ready for bed, but when we looked around for a toilet, there was none to be seen. Ethan didn't have any problems with this, but Brooklyn was not excited about doing her business out in the open, and Kyle was at a loss about how to help. We finally ended up driving up the road to a campground with a toilet, and after some fear about falling in (who doesn't worry about falling into a campground toilet), everyone got their business done.
The next morning we got up and Kyle started to prepare breakfast to a chorus of "I'm cold" and "I want to go home."  Once the kids had food in their tummys and the sun came out, everyone started having a fun time playing in the stream and exploring the campground. During our exploring, we found that our campground's toilet was over the river and up the hill.  If only we'd known about it the night before...

After packing up camp, we headed up the road and found a fun trail to hike on.  Ethan was a good hiker, and he wanted to keep going, despite the many rocks he tripped over.  Brooklyn wanted  to go home and play on the computer.  

On our hike, we found this bridge on the trail.  The kids were very careful crawling over it.

Ethan and Brooklyn wanted to take a picture along the trail with the two of them hugging.  Here's how it turned out.

Ethan cried when it was time to come home.  He wanted to stay there for "100,000 days."