Cabin Fever -- epic post, too many pictures, riddled with typos

Back in the fall, some friends of ours started planning a trip up to the snow and invited us along.  Yes, it's true.  If you live in Arizona, you pay money and drive 4 hours to the middle of nowhere for the sole purpose of repeatedly putting your kids in and pulling them out of snow clothes and yelling, "SHUT THE DOORS."  But hey, we hadn't worn socks in awhile, so why not. Only in Arizona we don't actually *own* snow clothes, so we spent 2 weeks borrowing odds and ends from everyone we know.

 How fitting that Nate and Daven had snow coats in their team colors.

 

We ended up in a friend's family's cabin.  It was built for their even larger family reunions so it managed to fit our army of children.  I was amazed at how many we managed to fit in there and how quiet it seemed to be most of the time, but then I realized the Duggar's do it every day and they only have one mother to feed everyone.

The cabin was perfect except for one thing: it was in the middle of nowhere.  Literally.  We drove to the middle of nowhere, turned North and drove some more. The benefit to that was we never needed to "just run to the store."  And the husbands never needed to go see a movie one night.  We spent all of our time unshowered (not just me, people!!) and relaxing.

A few of us finally decided to shower. . . the day we were going home

You would have thought I would lose some weight with the great arm work out that is putting on snow boots and bibs (seriously -- you people do this every day??), but I still managed to gain 5 pounds.  Hmmm, I wonder why?

The snack closet actually stayed in tact pretty well for the first 12 hours or so -- until the children discovered its existence.  I once opened a package of cookies, ran upstairs to get something and came back down to find only one left in the entire package.  We blew through 3 Costco bags of M&Ms.  Let's just say we were well fed.

As soon as breakfast was over Saturday morning, While the adults were still eating breakfast Saturday morning, the children started moseying outside in just their PJs.  When we finally got them appropriately dressed and outside, the big kids headed straight for the hill behind the house while the little kids tried to make snow angels and a snowman or have a snowball fight.

 

None of those worked out well.  The snow was really dry and hard, but some were just happy to *eat* the snow. 

 Or roll down the hill.

 
We ended up going over to sled with all the other kids.  It was a little bit of a climb to get up the snowdrifts -- sometimes it's was thigh high on my legs, but the kids made it up (ok, maybe I dragged a few of them up).

And were rewarded.

It was kind of fun to be on vacation where most of my kids are self-sufficient!  I did spend a lot of time with someone special (if you can't tell from the pictures):

 

Luckily the big boys are all such amazing kids(that seems crazy to call them since they aren't really kids, but "young men" seems a little Mrs. Robinson to me) and took great care of the littlest ones.  Cheese ball moment: I am so grateful my kids have such great role models around them.

And I mean, who wouldn't want to play with Luke?  He is pretty fun!  And he really really loves sledding.  Even if he's too scared to open his eyes.

After lunch we headed out to an even bigger hill about 20 minutes away.  Our main goal was to wear the children out so much that they would manage to sleep in past their 6:20 wake up call that morning.

The kids trudged up and down that hill for hours.  Well, except the big girls, who all managed to get hurt someway or the other during the first hour and went with Brenna to get gas.

I was actually surprised that it was Luke and Sadie who made the most trips up and down the hill.  Luke bummed a ride down with anyone he could find.

Sadie and Logan ended up going down the hill together, grabbing their sled and going right back down together.  If only Logan loved Sadie as much as Sadie loves him.  But don't worry readers -- Sadie has a crush on just about any boy over the age of 6 and she has many admirers.

Luke finally was worn out, and pushed the boys down the hill.  With his head.

Finally the kids were exhausted and we bummed around for the rest of the evening.

Sunday we *really* bummed around.  Our kids even managed to sleep in until 7!!  The dads took all the boys out shooting.  I have never touched a gun, so naturally I gave Nate a nice long lecture about being safe.  Nate looks at me with a worried expression and asks, "What are we shooting?"  I couldn't resist so I said, "Each other."  Oh his face!!

While the little boys were off shooting, the Hyamonds ended up with the middles outside, while I kicked everyone's trash in spoons and almost won all the M&Ms (that were left) in Texas Hold 'Em.

When I finally trekked over to the playground, I found out that Sadie was checking off her birthday wish list one thing at a time.  Snowball fight with "Mr Haymond"!

 And the big girls built a snow family.

Then the dads came back and Sadie's last birthday wish came true -- her very own snowman.

 And one for Luke too.

 There was some swinging

And then MORE snowball fights.  Why is Luke terrorizing his future wife?

We taught the kids how to play The Name Game and played that for a few hours too.  It gets a bit confusing when you're trying to remember 20 names.

Sunday night we played Hide N Go seek in the dark.  I love that game.  I managed not to be found 2 out of the 4 rounds, and one of the rounds I was found was at the very end (and I think Karen peed her pants when I grabbed her), so I managed to not have to seek very much.  The last round, I was found 2nd, I set out to hunt everyone down. As I hunted around in the dark, I realized I had no clue the layout of anyone's room but my own.  I ended up running into the wall a few times.  My hand ended up in the toilet. . . excellent fun.

Then the kids all settled down for a sleep over and the parents played the most heated game of Celebrity I have ever played.  So loud that our *children* told us to quiet down.  There were challenges and accusations of cheating.  Apparently the boys though J. Golden Kimball was legit but not Louisa May Alcott.  I submit google as a reference to which one is obviously more popular.  In the end, the boys won -- BOO!!  And not just one game.  TWO games!

 the mittens are my mom's high school ski gloves

But that's ok, because they all know they're lucky to have us.  Rematch is already scheduled.

Monday we played some games, ate some food, packed up and headed home promising to do it again next year.  In fact, we missed them all so much already we met up with the Christensen's for lunch on our way home.