Not Guilty!

We all knew this was coming, right? The blog was so exciting and fun when it first started, and I had all these great stories to tell. But alas, the bloggymoon is over and now I'm lucky if I blog once a month! This really does cause me a fair amount of guilt. But I came across this article on what parents should NOT feel guilty about, so here's a few of my favorites.

• Taking a vacation with only your husband. It's such a tragedy for the kids to spend time with their superindulgent grandparents! In our case, Grammy (Bryan's mom) lives two blocks away, Nana (Jill's mom) and GG (Jill's grandma) are here in town as well. Then, substitute the above "vacation" with "Sunday night Bible study" and add "superindulgent babysitter". Now that our small group is on a break for the summer, the kids are literally begging us to go on a date so the babysitter can come and play games with them!
• Enjoying going to work. You can love your kids and still have that "Thank God It's Monday" feeling, well, every Monday. If you know me at all, you KNOW this is all me! I am usually ready to auction the kids on ebay by Saturday at, um, 10:00am. Yet the Saturday evening $1 family movie rentals and the Sunday morning snuggles are definitely my favorite part of the weekend. But alas, there are some weekends I secretly wonder if I could work 7 days a week!
• Accepting your child's compliment that you're a good cook when they're eating pre-breaded microwave chicken breasts. You did your part. You pressed "start". Maezie actually told me "good cook!" once when she was eating cereal and milk. Well we can't ALL be Bobby Flay, right?
• Sitting and reading a good book. You'll go exercise right after the next chapter, or maybe the one after that. I have decided there is only one reason for reading: to escape your own life's drama! My mother rolls her eyes that I read the same books over and over, but I think it's no different than watching your favorite movie again and again. And I can skip to the good parts without missing anything!
• Feeling smug that you're a better parent than those on Supernanny. No worries. We all feels smug watching it. Until we don't, at which time we employ her techniques. Suddenly my own kids aren't quite so bad (which means I'm not such a bad parent after all!) when I can watch other houses with kids who take more than 6 hours to get to sleep. And hey, if the new techniques work for THOSE parents, then surely I can get mine to bed earlier....which means more book reading for me!
• Dipping into your kid's goody bag when they aren't looking. What's a fun-size Snickers between family members? Just a mere 8 hours ago, Graeson was at a birthday party with a pinata. When the kids collected their plunder and gave their treat bags to their moms to "hold this for me", ALL of us moms started digging for the chocolate! We saved them the rock hard taffy and the fire hot jawbreakers, isn't that good enough?
• Not signing up to be the class parent. Some days, it's all you can handle to get your kid fed, dressed, and on the bus. That's huge! I use my "but I work full-time, so sorry" excuse, and usually there's not even any guilt. Until my carpool buddy and also-works-full-time friend starts making me look bad by having lunch with her kid once a week and taking time off work for field trips. Well maybe I can squeeze in one field trip a year. If it's less than an hour. And it's to Starbucks.
• Plagiarizing a magazine article just to think of a blog entry. Ok, that wasn't really in the article, but there's no reason to feel guilty about that, right? (PS. Thanks Parenting Magazine! Can you help me out again next month?)

Snow Camping

This year we didn't plan our camping so well. We went to LaPine...in the mountains....in May...in a year when winter refuses to give up. The highest the temperature reached was somewhere around 39 degrees. We had rain, snow, sleet, hail, wind, and everything in between! (Of course we finally saw the sun on go-home day!) But we still had a great time with the extended Patterson family. (Sorry Washington folks, I somehow didn't get a single picture of any of you!)


The first thing Kaela and Graeson did was designate a spot for their "fort". It even had multiple rooms!

Of course we had s'mores....but it was so cold, they un-melted by the time we put them all together!

That's right, those are LONG PANTS you see on Bryan! (Now you know it was cold!)

The first day it snowed and was really cold, so we went to the High Desert Museum and waited out the storm.

There was plenty of cuddling under the blankets. (Maezie was not thrilled with the cold.)

And of course there was plenty of climbing on Papa.

We did actually see some people tent camping. Yikes! Thank goodness for our RV, Dad's cabin, and a big fire pit!