Our Wolf

May 09, 2017

Our Wolf

Let me just preface all this to say ... I love everything we do that we do all together. Dad travels Sun - Wed every week and April was EOQ and after EOQ I definitely feel starved for family time. Sales life and life by quarters isn't for the timid or meek. And that doesn't say I do it particularly well, by any means, it's super hard during this stage of life. But it gets a little bit better as time goes on.

G's spring campout and promotion ceremony for Cub Scouts was last weekend. We went to Eisenhower State Park on Lake Texhoma about an hour north of our house. We stayed over Friday night, and left Saturday after the promotion ceremony. Saturday was a looooooong day for my littles and G was wiped too, but he had so much fun. He loves cub scouts and his den. Getting along with the entire Pack for the weekend was hard. It's a lot of kids of varying ages and skills all trying to co-exist and that was new and different for me. I'm not the mom who just lets other kids act up. So I was correcting big kids who looked at me like I had two heads but no young man, I will not let you push that other child down and fight. No young man, I will not let you pull branches off of a living tree for firewood. So that was fun.

Added to all this ... J did not sleep well. Her and I probably got four hours of sleep total from about midnight to 4am. I brought her pack n play but she was so confused about the whole thing and was screaming. Which I can't let happen because she'll keep the entire campground up. So she slept with me in my bag. And we were cold. And it was not ideal.

Welcome to tent camping baby girl.

So I wasn't my most patient but I did try and rally. G and D did great and loved it. They did ask for electronics and except for a period during naptime when we decided J and D needed to veg, they were unplugged (except me and insta - don't judge). It was EOQ so Lew had to work some.

But we tried, ya'll. We tried.

We hiked the "caves" at the state park and the boys loved that. We skipped rocks. We did some nature tracking. We found bob cat prints that the boys are convinced was the biggest gray wolf prints in the world. We played Guess that Animal and G loves all things animal and he fancies himself an animal expert so that's fun for him to show off his animal knowledge. It was much fun.

It was also exhausting. And everything ran late and the littles were just spent and Julia was a hot mess by the end of the day to the point that I felt a bit guilty making her do this. It was a lot for her.

But he advanced having earned 18 of 19 tiger badges and now he's a wolf and all of the boys were just so proud. And they should be! They met the requirements. And it's a big deal.

My favorite thing about the whole thing is this ... when you ask G what the Cub Scout motto is .. "Do your best."

And if only that stays with him ... it will all be worth it.

More pictures from our year as a Tiger ...