How to Spend a Saturday

We had an absolutely beautiful weekend here in the Pacific Northwest and I did NOT spend it working on my house or my yard.  Instead, we went camping and had a wonderful time!

A few months ago, my oldest friend (well, she’s not that old – she’s younger than me, in fact – but she’s the one I’ve known the longest) sent out an email looking for people to go camping at a KOA up north.  It was my birthday weekend, so I thought, what the heck!

This is what our camp site looked like:

And this is what theirs looked like:

Wowsa!  We thought we were sitting pretty because that tent was loaned to us by another friend.  Ours was way too small for our family of four and this borrowed tent was awesome!  We could actually stand up in it!  But my friend’s 5th wheel was very cool.  And I gotta say: if you’re going to go tent camping, you should definitely go with someone who has a camper.  It makes doing the dishes muuuuch easier.

This is how we spent almost our whole Saturday:

Both of our 5 year olds wanted to learn to ride with no training wheels, so we thought this was the perfect opportunity.  When Thing 1 learned to ride with no training wheels, a friend of mine told me the secret: take the pedals off the bike and let them coast down a small hill.

I can’t even tell you how amazingly well this works!  It helps them learn the feeling of balancing a bike without worrying about any of the other things (like pedaling or braking).  Our girls practiced this for several hours, then we decided to try putting the pedals back on and see what happened.

I actually thought it would be too soon, but we went from this:

 

to this within a half an hour:

So, so cool!  At one point, I was reflecting on the fact that I’m no longer 20 (having birthdays will do that to you), but then I realized that I just watched my youngest learn how to ride a bike like a big girl and I realized that growing older definitely has its perks!