Southern Utah!

In an effort to not have a post that is 5 screens long I have decided to post about one day at a time of the trip.  So today will be about day one of our trip, it's mostly journaling.  The AWESOME pictures of the things we saw and did will be on posts in the next few days.

We really wanted to leave first thing Friday morning for our trip.  It took me all week of getting all of my photography jobs finished and delivered while packing and while taking care of Chico.  We don't have all our camping stuff together in a bin yet so it still takes us forever to get everything together that we need. (We've decided to get it organized now because of how long it takes, so hopefully in the future, leaving on a camping trip won't be such a huge ordeal.)
With Brent's amazing skills he got the car loaded with all of the stuff. Throughout the trip whenever we were moving campgrounds it always looked doubtful that it would fit back in the car but he always made it fit somehow!
So we were finally on our way and the drive was so easy!  We sang songs with Chico a lot, but he also entertained himself a lot too.  It was so cute, I looked back at him and he was sitting there "reading" one of his books to himself (which he'll never do at home).  He also played with his teddy bear a bunch which was also adorable.
We arrived at our campground that was in Mt. Carmel outside of Zion National Park.  We set up the tent that our friends let us borrow so we wouldn't freeze at that high elevation.  It was much better than ours so we were VERY grateful for them letting us borrow it. After we got camp all set up I made some Dutch Oven Lasagna!  Brent had studied dutch oven cooking before we left and figured out how to do it and all I had to do was put the food in the pot and he'd take care of the rest.  It was THE best lasagna I've ever made.  Perhaps it was because we were camping but I do believe even if we weren't camping it would have been just as good.  So good in fact that I documented it with the camera (don't worry, it's the only meal from the trip that I took a picture of).







It got really cold as soon as the sun went down.  I hate being cold.  I kind of shut down when it's cold.  So Chico and I hid in the tent while Brent cleaned up camp then we all went to bed.  The first night was probably our worst night.  It was SO cold and Chico kept escaping from his sleeping bag.  Luckily Brent was awesome about getting him back in the bag and keeping him asleep.  Thankfully the nights got much better after that, though there was still the occasional escaping out of the sleeping bag by Chico, crazy kid.  One thing that made the nights hard for me and Brent was that the air mattress we brought with us had a tear in it that we didn't know about. We think it tore when we were packing.  Anyway, so all we had was the thin foam pad we were planning on putting on top of the air mattress (for warmth purposes).  It was better than sleeping directly on the ground I guess, but not much better.  It felt okay if you slept on your back but... yeah I'm to the point in the pregnancy where technically you're supposed to be sleeping on your side.  I tried so hard to stay on my sides but alas, getting your hips dug into the ground is only comfortable for so long.  I'm sure it's not that big of a deal to spend half the night on your back when you're only halfway through the pregnancy.  The baby is fine I'm sure. :)