arts and crafts

it took eight hours to get there, but we finally made it to cashiers a little after 10:00 on friday night.  our previously pooped carload of little people turned the corner quickly and went a little crazy once we arrived at the cabin.  fueled by the excitement of seeing grandpam and papaw as well as the discovery of the fact that the kitchen is upstairs in the cabin, they started bouncing off the wood-paneled walls in no time.

the first task at hand was deciding where to put everyone to sleep.  the cabin has a bedroom and a half (that's what we call the 6'x8' nook that has a little bed in it) as well as a couple of couches in the living room.  somehow, i didn't get a single picture of the arrangement we came up with so my written description will have to suffice.  grandpam and papaw slept in the main bedroom with both of the dogs and the cat.

wait, i didn't mention that there were pets there, too?  oh yes, we had four grown-ups, six children, two black labish dogs, and one cat in the bedroom-and-a-half cabin over the weekend of the fourth.  WOW!

where was i?  ah yes, grandpam and papaw slept in the main bedroom with both of the dogs and the cat, and we put our late sleepers (in comparison with the eastern time zone crew) in the little bedroom like this:  i slept on the bed, izzy slept on a blow-up crib-sized mattress in the two feet of available space to my left, abby slept in her sleeping bag in the two feet of available space to my right, and jack did the same at the foot of the bed.

and somehow it worked out beautifully!   (this was izzy celebrating her first "tee-tee in the potty" experience at the cabin.)

if you're doing the math, you know that this left josh and three little people to sleep in the living room upstairs.  one couch and a row of sleeping bags fit the bill perfectly, and we were one, big, happy family in a packed house!

no sooner had we gotten up the next morning than grandpam announced that the first activity of the weekend was going to be arts and crafts.  ok, that might not strike you as odd, but pam isn't much of a glitter-and-glue kind of gal so we were all anxiously waiting to see what she had in mind.  come to find out, she had spent a couple of hours in michael's the week before (she said michael's was like walking into a foreign country for her!) gathering all the needed supplies to make "camp cashiers" t-shirts for all the kids.  she stayed up late getting them all started and then she let the kids put the finishing touches on their individual t-shirts.

with "camp cashiers" shirts in place, the weekend could officially begin.  ;-)