Bear Lake Paradise

Man oh man, I'm in heaven. I've been up at Bear Lake, ID for nearly three weeks now....and somehow (even with the crazy chaos) it is not getting old. For the past three years (since I became a full time mom) I've had the chance to come up here for most of July with the kids. Jeff comes when he can and at the end for our big Eyrealm reunion....but mostly it's just me and the kids, my awesome sisters and their kids, Grammie and Grandfather and whatever friends we can convince to make the drive up for the day.

I can't get enough of how beautiful it is up here and how nice it is to be away from everything and to really concentrate on my kids. I'm drinking them in. I think they're loving all the unstructured time and all the attention from cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. I spent most of my summers as a kid up here, and it's so great to watch them fall in love with the same things. This year is a particularly golden year cause my kids are so darn easy. They're pretty much content to hang at the beach all day with out too much intervention from me, so I can spend more time then ever taking to my sisters and parents and reading and thinking and sleeping. It really is paradise.

Here's what a typical day is like for us up here.

We get up in the morning and my sisters and I trade off doing a bunch of learning kind of activities with the kids. We do crafts and games and puzzles and have some great story times (we went to the Salt Lake library this year before coming up and checked out the maximum of 100 books). The older kids work on their goals and help their little cousins with different things. It's so nice to have older kids around, my sisters and I have even been able to go out on various runs in the morning with the big cousins supervising. Ahhhh, the freedom!

After lunch we all PILE in and on one of our crappy beat up Monteros and head down to the beach. This shot is pretty blurry, but you get the idea for how loaded down those amazing little cars get. The kids LOVE these cars because they don't have to ride in seat belts and can even help drive on the sand.

We spend the afternoon on the beach, building all kind of creations with the sand, swimming in the perfectly shallow water, practicing running and swimming and dunking our heads under, riding on the boat and the tractor, chatting, reading etc. The beach is an amazing place. The kids really don't ever get tired of it. Ever. They are content to run and play and dig and explore for hours.

While Hazel is getting better at playing well with her cousins (at first her bossiness made it a little hard for the kids to stomach her for too long) she loves roaming off by herself and making up really pretty funny zen kind of smooth yoga-like dances. She will walk around for hours down there collecting sea shells, pretending she's a mermaid, making up new poses. It is quite entertaining.

And Charlie's pretty much content just to be Charlie. He walks around the beach with his belly protruding, acting like he owns the place. He plays well with cousins when he feels like playing and is pretty much content running back and forth, rolling around in the sand and singing at the top of his lungs (see picture below).

So, we are having a really really great time up here. However, it's not all flowers and roses like this post may make it look. There is crazy chaos that is inevitable when there are between 20-30 people crammed into a house together.....nearly everyone has been sick at some point throwing up or stuck in the bathroom with "diaperiah" (as Charlie calls it)....kids are walking up at all times in the night, there's nowhere to go in the morning with a cranky kid that wont wake up a bunch more cranky kids, Hazel screams at her cousins a lot, Charlie is forever walking around yelling "where is my mommy!" But I'll take all that chaos for the millions of magical moments up here. I know I'll be longing for even the chaos come next March when I'm stuck inside a house that we're too cheap to even heat.