A Time For Baughnding: Camping Weekend

Our church is a great supporter of missions - sending people out from our church to serve others and tell others about the love of Jesus. To help support the people who go on these mission trips, we hold a missions auction each year in the spring. The fun and unique thing is that it's not an auction of things, but an auction of opportunities for fellowship. This year, we wanted to contribute to it.

We are a camping family. We love it!!! We love the idea of getting out in the middle of nature, away from the rat race of the everyday for a break every so often. Putting this love of camping together with another one of our camping families, we created a camping item for the missions auction. We would provide the food, the tent, the location - all the winner needed to do was show up. This weekend, we got to fulfill the bid and enjoy a weekend up at Lake Allatoona.

One great thing about this trip was that we were already pretty good friends with the family who won the bid. They are truly a very sweet family!!! It's a family with three youth girls - the eldest whom we have used a number of times as a sitter for our kids. It was such an amazing weekend. The kids were out of school on Friday, which allowed us an extra day, since we had to be back at church on Sunday morning plus it was less than an hour's drive away (great when the gas prices are high).

Let me not mislead anyone. Thursday afternoon did not start off quite as smoothly as I would have liked. As I began unpacking, I realized that I had forgotten to pack the chicken that we would need for dinner on Saturday night. Not a big deal, I just called the third couple coming up (the ones who were helping us put on this trip, not the ones who bought the auction) and asked them to bring some extra chicken. Major problem avoided. Then I began to get the things together for the chili we would be fixing that night. But where are all the spices that I measured out on Wednesday afternoon? Oh, those would be in a bag. On the floor. Of our kitchen. At home. Not good. Nope, not a good thing.

Insert major freak-out episode here.

Now bring in my calm husband. He tries to calm me down and tries to think of various options. Option 1: We can serve everyone hot dogs - we had brought a few for anybody who didn't want the chili. Option 2: We can see what spices we have in our camper stash, see what we're short, then call the family who won the bid and ask them to pick up the main ingredients that we forgot. We choose to go with option 2. Did I mention how glad I was that we were already good friends with this family?

After this big fiasco, the weekend went on pretty smoothly. Except for a close encounter that Xander had with the street. It only lead to many tears, a busted lip and a scraped up nose, but he pulled through it like a trooper. I realized that I didn't get a close up shot of the injury, but we have the memories and I'm sure it's not the first time that we'll have some bruisers.

We were near the lake, which brought some fun playing with rocks, wading in the water and a new remote control boat that Craig got before we left (let me say that "it's not just a boat, it's a boat that has a fishing line attached to it so you can play with your remote control toy AND fish - all at the same time!" emphasis NOT mine, just imagine the voice and inflections of a flashy used car dealer here.) Unfortunately, the past years of drought was very evident in the lake. We had to walk over the do-not-swim-past-this-point floatation marker to get to the water. We were near the playground - which was great for the kids. The recently expanded (thanks to the drought) beach provided the perfect sandbox. Over all the camping weekend was great!!!

Nothing like yummy smores!!!