After Thanksgiving dinner we quickly tidied up, packed up the kids and took off down the road in the direction south. Kris and I had thought a lot about what area we should try to go to, and he had even done a morning scouting trip to a more nearby location to see if it would be good--it wasn't. We headed down towards the town of Pecos, through it and up a canyon. It wasn't an area we'd ever tried before.
The road was unusually easy to drive on--well, if you don't count the mud. When cutting a tree here in NM you're not allowed to cut anything that's growing within 300 feet of a paved road. So unless you want to hike way in to find a tree and hike it back out, you have to find a dirt road. So of course we found one. But it was so muddy and goopy that we were sliding everywhere--especially around corners. But besides that the road was really driveable, luckily. We went a ways up and found a little grove that looked like it had a lot of potential. I headed out to check out the scene, and we kept the kids in the car. It was super crazy muddy in the road. The little grove was raised up from the road by a few feet. When I climbed up there it wasn't muddy anymore. Yes, this seems like more details than we really need right now, but it goes into the story later.
There were some good trees, so the guys went to park the cars and get the kids out while Lechelle and I tried to find the perfect tree. Kris went to all this work to try to park in the least muddy spot possible. Uselessly, of course, as you might anticipate a muddy incident coming up soon.
Kris came up to look at trees with me, and we were making some good progress when suddenly we heard the Sandy death wail coming from somewhere near the car. Kris and I both figured that Max did something. That's what usually leads up to the siren wail. But it just kept going on. And then we could hear Kelly's Boston yelling something about somebody being stuck.
Kris ran down there to check out the scene. There he found a screaming Sandy, soaked to the bone with freezing muddy water. Why you may ask? We'll never know. There are so many different versions of the story that we just can't quite figure out what really happened. In some versions Max is the instigator of the incident through a dare. In others Max is the hero that runs in to save Sandy from the puddle and gets stuck himself in the process. In yet another version the trash compactor monster from Star Wars grabbed Sandy's ankle and dragged him down to the depths.
Want to see the "puddle"?
Want a sense of scale?
It's basically a swimming pool. What were those dumb kids thinking?
So every bit of Sandy was soaked. Down to the undies. His T-shirt was still ok but that was the only thing. So he had to strip down and sit in the car naked while the rest of us hunted for trees.
Lucy stayed out of the mud--only because we pretty much never let her feet touch the ground.
So poor Sandy had to stay in the car, and off the grownups went to finally find a tree. Of course, the rest of the kids went and got muddy. Kids are so stinking ridiculous.
Is that bigfoot in the background? Oh no, it's just Max. The huge mudballs that are his boots threw me off.
Lucy is fun. It's nice that she's still little enough to be carried most of the time.
And she gets selfies. Understands them. That's a big deal.
We finally settled on a tree after much debate. Well, we actually found two. No debate on the smaller one--there were lots of good small options--but picking the bigger one was really hard this time. We ended up finding one that was really quite tall and the bottom four feet or so were completely bald. So it worked out pretty well to cut off the boring part and just use the top.
Boys working on the small tree:
Big tree:
Bigfoot again? I always find bigfoot.
Here we are trying to pretend that we remember how life was before we had kids that try to foil every fun thing we ever do.
We can't remember. It's impossible. Remember Max falling in the mud puddle at the Notre Dame football game a few years ago? (rolling eyes emoji here)
Anyway, we found the trees and manly Kris cut them down and dragged them back to the car. Kris was super smart this time and brought a roll of plastic wrap to snug the trees up in. It worked really well, but was a little awkward when the our of us adults tried to roll both of our trees into the same roll!
The plunder:
Kids waited in the car while the dads got loaded up. Oh, except Max. He wasn't allowed back in the car yet. He was supposed to walk in circles around the meadow until the mud balls fell off. It ddn't work. All he did was antagonize his siblings through the window.
Nakey and Lucy being good sports for now.
And there you go. By the time we got home it was dark. Only one of us was naked though, so that's good. We were going to have pie afterwards all together but it was basically bedtime, so home we went.
We got the trees up that night and I still need to light them. Pictures will be forthcoming.
First of all, the sweater. I was more than a little thrilled to find this sweater for Sandy at Target, and Sandy was more than a little thrilled to wear it to church.
But he was having a hard day today. I teach an older class and so I am in sharing time with Sandy but sitting a few rows behind. All he could do was sit sideways in his chair, slumped and staring at me with big old sad cow eyes.
We went out in the hall after a while so I could try to figure out what was going on with him. I didn't figure it out, but I did get some pictures.
He came to my class with me after sharing time and it was pretty enjoyable. Hopefully it doesn't ruin him for going to his own class for the rest of his life.
But how can a guy with Darth Vader and tie fighter on his church sweater not be in a good mood all the time? Really?
