Playing catch-up

Whenever I feel the guilt about not posting for a while, I think "Crap, I need to tell everyone what's been going on, why I've been slacking, who's been here, yadda yadda yadda."  That only incites the overwhelmed button which causes more stalling which causes more "CRAAAAAPs," and so on and so forth.  So instead of boring you with the travel log of the past few weeks, I'll give a brief overview then show some pictures.  That's always easiest, right? 

Anyhoo, we had a family reunion over the 4th of July (I suppose that's an accurate way to put it).  It was basically for the offspring of Granny Marie and Grandpa Spud - six of us seven kids showed up, and our cousins too.  It was great to see everyone, and I tried my hardest to convince my sister Amy and her husband Pat to move their brood back to Cody because we all had such an amazingly fun time together (my kids have never had so much fun with other kids!). 

That reunion coincided with Amy's 20th high school reunion, so I got a chance to catch up with old friends that I knew from her grade and I made a lot of new ones too.  Great, great times.  Today Dave and I met up in Casper and I handed the kids over for a couple of weeks of fun in Denver.  It's only been half a day and so far I'm still alive!  I promised myself that I would be a big girl this time and not fall to pieces after the first week like I did when they went there over Christmas....

That's it in a nutshell, and following are a few photos I took when the kids and I drove up to one of my favorite childhood haunts, the Wapiti Campground, located up North Fork on the way to Yellowstone.  Granny and Grandpa used to take us kids up there just about every summer and we'd spend a couple of weeks playing by the river, playing in the fire, getting stinky filthy dirty, and just having the time of our lives (and giving Mom a much needed break!).  Awesome memories are held within that campground and if I had a hard-sided camper we'd be going every weekend as well.

We had planned to go and play in the river a little and check out the place and when we got there we saw that much of the campground had been flooded by the super high river.  The river was so enormous, the kids were able to find only one small sand bar where Brandon immediately plunked down and made himself a big pile of what looked like dark gooey poop.  And what a perfect pile of poop it was!  While it had been a scorcher in town, up in the mountains it was quite chilly and we weren't prepared, so we didn't stay long but we did enjoy the sounds and smells of the beautiful nature that surrounds us.