Darci

Darci is lovin the crawling thing, but now as soon as we put her down, she will find something to crawl over to and stand up on. She also loves to go to the store and sit up in the front of the cart now and see everything.

Derek's last T-ball game

Derek's last Tball game was this weekend. He got his trophy and he thinks they got one because they were 1st place. He doesn't know that all the teams got a trophy. His league didn't keep score or keep outs or anything. Next time we'll get him in a real coach-pitch little league. Here's a video of him playing 1st base and hitting the ball.



Monday was Derek's 1st day of kindergarten. We decided to have him do kindergarten again to be with all the kids his age (kids can't start early in New Mexico like they can in Arizona) and so he wouldn't be 16 when he starts his senior year. He's fine with it and he loves his class and his teachers. He's very excited to be in school again.


Little Miss Darci is standing up on toys and on us. She's getting into everything now. She's wearing the homemade "babyleg" leg warmers I made. Couldn't bring myself to spend $12 on the real ones.

Camping is always such an adventure.....

So we set out around lunch time on Monday intending to go camping for a few days near Santa Fe. Tad had spent a few weeks looking at campsites on the internet and we chose a few that looked good online and went to try them out. In person they were not that great. The tent sites weren't big enough for our tent, the sites were almost right on top of eachother and the other campgrounds didn't look that great.

So we decided to head out to Ghost Ranch, about an hour north. We were going to make this a day trip anyway the next day, so we just decided to camp there instead. This is the site of dinosaur digs and a museum. Well the campground there was more like a trailer park, so we opted not to camp there. Instead we went there the next day and checked out the museums and bones and now the "ceolophysis" is Derek's favorite dinosaur.

So, it was getting late, but we knew there was a campground farther north at Heron lake, about 40 minutes from Ghost Ranch. When we got there, it didn't look promising at first. The first 3 campsites we drove through didn't have that many trees, but finally we found a good spot on the lake. We had just enough time to get our tent up and walk to the lake when the sun set. It turns out this is a good lake to go fishing at in the winter if you like Salmon.







Derek found some "fossils" by the seashore.











Chama, New Mexico was only about 20 minutes north of our campground, so the next day we headed up there. There's a little downtown and a little train station and that's about it, but we got there in time to see the big steam engine toot its horn and take off. Scared the kids pretty bad.







Here are the Ghost Ranch pictures....





They had a little dig area for the kids... Derek found these "dinosaur" bones at a nearby reserve lying on the ground. They're probably Elk bones.


We drove by the Valles Caldera Natl Preserve. It's an ancient volcano site that is rumored to be full of elk herds. It's a private reserve owned by the government. No camping is allowed there, but they do lottery hunts and you can drive through and go fishing. We'll have to do that another time.


On the way to our 2nd campsite we took a short cut on this road for 45 minutes.... There was one tricky spot where I thought for sure we were going to get stuck, but luckily we had a good driver.


Along the way, we saw this guy....


This was our 2nd campsite about 1 hr from our apartment.






Camping is a lot of work with kids! Next time we'll try and get some other families with kids to come with us so they can be better entertained! We had a lot of fun, but it is good to be home and doen with all the clean up and the laundry!