Sunburns and Sand Dunes

I'm just cutting-and-pasting from my email of over a month ago, but I wanted to get the pictures on the blog.

For the first time in I don’t know when (ever?) we had a whole week off for spring break. We decided to take a family camping trip, and have been making our plans since St. Patrick’s day. We were going to do some bedroom rearranging the first half of the week, then go on the weekend, but found out a week before the event that the boys had a Scout campout this weekend, so we moved our campout to mid-week, and had to forgo the spring cleaning. We also decided to take Kurt, Carrie, and Sadie (some Winkler cousins) with us.

Originally we were going to go on Tuesday, but we got off to a late start because the brake job that was supposed to be done mid-day wasn’t done until the next morning. But by Wednesday night we had our trailer packed. We piled three kids, three cousins and a dog into the suburban, and headed off to the Warm Springs in Meadow.

We got there at about 9:00 at night, with a frosty chill in the air, but the kids plunged in anyway while Marden & I finished “setting up camp.” One of the cousins came back earlier, but the rest of the kids stayed in the spring for about 2 ½ hours, until I dragged them out around midnight. They froze all the way back to the trailer, but then we settled in and went off to sleep.

The next morning after breakfast we headed back to the springs. I had a moment of panic when I remembered that my doctor’s only two restrictions were hot tubs and horseback riding, but the water was the perfect temperature—about 100 degrees. We stayed in for “about an hour” according to one of the kids—really three hours by my watch—then headed back for lunch. At that point we started figuring out that everyone was sunburnt. I’d blocked my face, and thought I would be all right because we all had rash guards, but the cousins with darker skin got fried, and my kids with fair skin and rash shirts ended up with scorched faces and arms. My thighs turned into lobster shells—bright red and totally inflexible. I had a hard time walking the next day by the time my belly & hips hurt from the baby bowling ball, and my legs hurt from the sunburn. You never really truly appreciate the elasticity of skin until you don’t have it for a while.

I was so busy having fun I forgot to take pictures, but that night we got pictures of all the sunburns:

Po' Pitiful Kurt

Sweet Carrie

Sadie and Felicity in the top bunk

Taft is tired

Seph is Silly

Taft, Kurt, Carrie, Seph

After lunch we went off to the “Little Sahara” sand dunes. It is only about one to one and a half hours from one site to the other, but before we’d gone halfway we figured out that the muffler that blew on the trip to the Warm Springs was melting wires together. We were glad it was daylight, because we lost our brake lights in the mishap. Marden spent a good portion of his time at the dunes getting us driveable for heading home.

The sand dunes were fun. We had the campfire and the s’mores before bedtime, and the next morning almost everyone was buried up to their necks in the sand.

The kids even offered to bury me, but I decided on my own (without my doctor’s help) that being buried in the sand with a pregnant belly was not a good idea. I was totally proud of myself just for making it up the dune three times to take pictures. Just that much made me feel breathless with burning thigh muscles. I’m so pathetically out of shape!

I made the kids pose for a few group shots:

We got home with just enough time to repack a few items, shower up some boys, and send them on the Scout campout. It was bit of an anticlimax for them, because they ended up going to the Diamond Fork warm springs! Seph is the only one in the whole group who even got in the water. He went swimming and got beaned with a snowball on the same campout!

We are all back home now, and starting to recover. It was a nice break from school.