Fishing & Camping Trip

We planned a camping trip with the kids for this weekend - something I've really wanted to do with the kids for awhile!  Chad's parents had wanted to take the kids fishing at their friend's house, so we decided to combine the two outings and make it an all-outdoors day for the kids!  So, we headed up to Lenoir first thing in the morning and arrived at David Abernathy's farm.  I thought we'd just do a little fishing - I didn't realize they had all those animals and beautiful property!!  The kids loved it, after they realized it was okay to get dirty.  =)   Pretty much every time you threw your line in, you caught a fish!  And sometimes they were pretty big!  Here's Chad with one of the bigger catches.

 

Emma, Susan and I walked around the farm to meet all the animals with Elizabeth, David's wife.  Emma loved the cats the best - there were at least 25 of them!  And they were all very friendly and loved her attention!

Aww! 

And this baby kitty didn't even mind being held by its neck (although we helped him to safety pretty quickly! haha)

Emma was a little nervous around the three horses, but we petted them and talked to them for a little bit.  And I was more afraid of Polly the Piggy than Emma!  Elizabeth grabbed some grass and hopped over the fence to feed the pig...so Emma grabbed some grass and reached up for Elizabeth to help her over to the pig too! 

Drew caught several fish all on his own!  He just needed help putting the worm on the hook and he wasn't too thrilled with touching the fish.

 

Then I took Drew on a walk to go see all these kitties that Emma had been talking about.  I would have taken all these grey Sergio kitties home with me if I could have!! They were so pretty!

Drew was a little better at picking up the new babies than Emma!  haha

Here's Drew reeling one in!

They needed a net to get this big one in!

Here's Drew bringing in ANOTHER one!  Next time he goes fishing he might be disappointed with all the waiting for fish to bite...

Chad had to help Emma with the pole.  Apparently when Drew and I were going on a walk, Emma helped reel in a really big one!

Emma started losing interest in fishing pretty quickly... And there's Scooby the dog in the background.  He jumped on Emma and knocked her down to lick her when we first got there and scared her to death - but they soon became friends!

We ate lunch with Chad's parents and hung out for a little bit, and then we headed to the Lake Norman State Park for some camping.  The kids were so excited and loved helping set up the tent.  

But their favorite part was jumping on the blow up mattresses!

Drew and I  =)

When we were driving back up to the front of the park to go on a hike around the lake, this deer came out of the woods and stared at us.  We talked to him, and he didn't move!  haha

Drew and Emma on our hike

I love this picture of Drew!

Another favorite picture of mine!

 





We had fun looking for creatures and Drew wanted me to get pictures of them.  Here's our lizzard friend!

And there were a bunch of dragonflies and butterflies around the water.

I love automatic timer pictures - the kids' "cheese" is almost painful looking by the time it takes the picture!

Dinner!!  Yum!

The kids enjoyed eating marshmallows!

And they liked roasting the marshmallows...although they wouldn't eat them roasted - they'd pass them on to us!

We even played some CandyLand after dark by the light of our lantern!  (and the kids had ringpops!)

Overall, it was a very fun day!  We were a little upset that we missed the paddleboats (we got there 15 minutes too late), but that's just a good excuse to go back soon!  The kids had a hard time calming down to go to sleep, so we all ended up laying down around 10 or so.  They slept until about 7:15am, and we had our poptarts and granola bars for breakfast and packed up.  Our first family camping trip was a success!!  =)