Our amazing family cabin trip!

Well this week was quite an adventure as we went up to my grandparents cabin in overgaard. All of the immediate family was there: Dad, Mom, Cheryl, J.R., Esther, Kristen, myself, Faith, Julia, Barbara, and John boy! we had a fantastic amount of fun and I will give you a break down of what happened each day! Monday: We drove up to the cabin. On the way out of town Kristen and I stopped for a free slurpee from 7-11. I had not realized that when they do those free slurpees on the date 7-11, it is a very extra small cup. After that we met up with the family at my parents house, hit the gas station for one last stop and then drove to overgaard. Overgaard is about 2 and ½ hours from Mesa. We did stop at Payson for some groceries from Walmart and then Kristen, Julia, Faith, and I went and got some breakfast from Mcdonalds. We soon learned that this would be a grave mistake....we all started to feel a little sick from the food within the next day or two. When we finally arrived at the cabin and unloaded all of our belongings, we had a delicious lunch of springroll wraps. There were many different things that could be used to make the wraps. We all thought it was funny that Barbara chose to use cheetos, chicken, and cheese in her wraps! After lunch Kristen and I went to take a nap for a few hours while others napped. or just relaxed. Then when everyone was moving again, we started our family merit badges. First on the agenda was LOOM A HAT! This was taught by Faith and since most of us had already loomed our hats, she taught us additional crafts and items that we could loom. One that my wife really liked was the pumpkin crafts. This used a smaller loom and was made up of orange yarn. She worked on it all week long and was able to finish up her pumpkin towards the end! It looks awesome! The next merit badge was CPR/First Aid who was taught by Esther. She taught about all sorts of emergencies and medical catastrophes that we are likely to encounter living here in Arizona! Upon finishing up the merit badges, we all gathered round for a great feast of Dads famous tacos. I did get a a slight burn while helping Dad to prepare it and everyone joked about the first aid techniques that we had just learned. After dinner Julia helped to demonstrate how to make gluten free peanut butter cookies which were most definitely amazing! She also cooked up some sugar free brownies...now I was not so fond of these as they were more like the consistency of corn bread. But as my brother said "if you are going to eat corn bread, wouldn't you rather that it be chocolate?" I guess that does have some pretty good logic. lol Tuesday morning we got up and ate smoothies and bagels at about 830 and then headed to the local fish hatchery. It was really cool and my Dad explained that the hatchery bred and grew the fish that were then used to stock the rivers, streams, and lakes up on the rim. We got to feed the fish and see fish of all different stages and sizes. Then we headed to woods canyon lake and had a delicious picnic lunch. Cheryl had put in all the necessary preparations and it was delicious. It was funny when Barbara realized that there was pudding and so she started yelling "pood-ing I need it"! After that Julia and I went crawdad hunting while Kristen watched Barbara and read her book. We really did catch a lot of crawdads and got to cook those up later on back at the cabin.  It was cool because when we started boiling them, all of there shells turned bright red! Dad showed us how to shell and eat them. They didn't have a lot of taste but for the most part they tasted a lot like shrimp. Unfortunately the fishermen didn't have any luck and so later on Saturday morning they went to try their luck once again. However there still were no fish to be caught. Anyways after having dinner and cleaning up, Cheryl did her merit badge over General Conference. She had us read off our trivia sheets that we had filled out previously.  With each correct answer we earned a rolo!!! She also helped us to recognize the prophets and apostles voices. Then Mom did her merit badge on temples. We all filled out a global chart to show where each one of the more than 130 temples are located. It was a really cool activity and helped me to learn quite a lot about the temples. Wednesday we got up early to go to the temple in Snowflake. It was such a beautiful temple and thanks.to my wifes foresight, we took a bunch of pictures outside on the temple grounds. Kristen, Mom, Cheryl, and I participated in Endowments while J.R., Julia, and Dad did baptisms. The rest of the family met us afterwards for lunch at the local Mexican restaurant. We quickly learned that the food was amazing but the service was horrible!!!! Our waiter completely forgot about us and the only reason we ate anything was because Esther bothered a waitress and let her know that after 15 minutes we still hadn't even ordered our meals. She quickly took care of the situation, took our orders, and had our food out quickly. Mine was delicious...I had the chili relleno! Afterwards we stopped at Dairy Queen for dessert!!!! Then we headed back to the cabin to relax and nap for the rest of the afternoon. After an awesome spaghetti diner was prepared and devoured, we participated in the Spanish merit badge and then we played a bunch of games for Julias puzzles and games merit badge.  The craziest game we did was thawing out a frozen t shirt!  This really took a lot of silly ideas: sitting on it, breathing on it, folding it, etc... Eventually we got it thawed out!!!! Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were a lot more chill. We were all pretty tuckered out so we just hung around the cabin, went for a birdwatching hike for Faiths merit badge and watched movies and played games. We did three more merit badges on thursday: J.R. taught about dutch oven cooking, Kristen taught massaging, and Mom taught hair cutting. Friday Dad taught how to make duct tape wallets and I taught story telling. Esther also taught the Book of Mormon merit badge and that finished all of the badges. Saturday we woke up, ate left overs and then drove home! All in all it was a great week and its too bad that it had to end!

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