The Nightmare Before Thanksgiving

There it is-- #146, it still makes me cringe to look at it.
Jim in "our room". Don't let the comfy blankets and pillows we brought from home fool you. It was, no contest, the worst bed we've ever hardly slept on.

Kyle chillin' (literally, it was so cold) in his top bunk. Him and Jim were the best sports about the cabin.

Johnny and Luke in their bunks. Look how thrilled they are to be there. We hadn't even slept there yet... Oh my.

They did like to snuggle up on the porch swing. Notice the big chapter book Luke is holding. He likes to take Kyle's big books and pretend to read them, or so we thought he was pretending. Now we are not so sure. This kid reads signs and things he's never seen before and we are always like "HOW did you manage to read that?" When his cousin Jake took him to the bouncy pillow (pictures and video's to come) Jake asked Luke if he was going to get on it. Luke told him "Just a minute, I'm reading the sign" Then he said to Jake "It says No Footwear Allowed. I have to take off my sandals first." When Jake came back to camp he told us about it and asked me "How old is he again?" 4, he's 4!

Luke gets the porch swing to himself.

"Don't believe the stories my Mom tells about me. You can see by my grin that I'm always sweet, right?"

Okay, nightmare might be a bit of an exaggeration of our stay in the cabin...but not by much. We have not stayed in one of these cabins before so did not come as prepared as we would of had we known. The worst part was the beds. We were told to just bring our bedding but the beds had a mattress. I don't know if they should legally be allowed to call them a mattress or not. It was more like a nap mat given out to Preschoolers at day care but placed on wooden slats. It was bad... real bad. The next morning when our family all got together we mentioned that we didn't exactly sleep great so were going to leave and look for a store to buy a memory foam or something to make the next night bearable. That's when my brother (who's stayed here many times before) agreed that their mattresses really are horrible and that's why they bring an air mattress. Once we learned they had that we pounced... We ended up taking their "mattress" (which was twice as thick as ours and still bad) and putting it on top of our "mattress" making our bed possibly comfy enough to make it through just one more night.

We may have then got some decent sleep except that our kids , who almost always sleep all through the night at home, had to get up again and again to go use the restrooms. This meant bundling up and heading out in to the cold for the walk to the bathrooms. (Seriously, WHY do people camp?... I don't get it at all).

We had such a BLAST at the actual grounds and spending time with my family but if we join my family again for this Thanksgiving tradition we will be heading to a nearby hotel each night!