Camping

The Stutelberg's had their family camping debut this weekend! We went camping for the first time as a family. It was a great time! Our friends, the Schneiders, go camping every year with another family and they invited us along. In our 3 families their were 6 kids all under age 5!! We went to Carpinteria Beach (15 miles south of Santa Barbara) on Saturday morning. The other families spent two nights and arrived on Friday but since Karl works late and we were unsure how the kids would do we decided to go for only one night. The slide show below is a little out of order but you can get the basic idea of what we did! We spent most of the day on Saturday at the beach. The kids had a great time digging, building sand castles and burring Bill! After playing for a couple hours the younger kids were getting tired so we loaded them up in the jogging strollers and the 3 moms, Dawn, Michelle, and I went for a run while the kids napped. After running/napping we walked down the beach a bit and checked out tide pools. The kids thought it was really cool to (gently) stick there fingers in the sea urchins! We then went back to camp and got everyone showered and in pjs, which is no easy feat!! Following a great dinner we made smores. The kids were so tired they all went to sleep without too much protest around 8:00! I was really worried how Micah would sleep but he did pretty good. Other than wanting to party from 4:00-5:00am the night went pretty good. Matt was so excited about this whole adventure! Sunday morning we had breakfast and took turns borrowing bikes and taking the kids on bike rides. We then packed everything up and went to the Santa Barbara Zoo for a couple hours. Matt got to feed a giraffe and we rode on a little train around the zoo. Both boys really love zoos and had good time even though they were SOOO tired!! We all had so much fun I think we are up to a longer camping trip in the spring! Although I feel like I need a vacation after our little vacation! It is a whole different ball game camping with 2 kids! It was great that our first trip was with seasoned campers! Our friends were so helpful! Enjoy the pictures!