Author: Abe Darais

Yesterday I was exhausted beyond belief recovering from the work week. Today, Lily felt sick (sore throat, very tired and generally feeling ill). Fortunately, I had some good energy today. I got up around 8AM and worked steadily on the house until about 1:30, when I picked up Basil and ran some errands.

About that time, Lily started being more active. Even though she still wasn’t feeling great (she has a hard time not being active), she got up to help Mary bake her birthday cake, and help clean the house.

The cake, as you can see above and below, was a complete masterpiece! It makes me so happy looking at it!

My dad and Suzanne were going to join us for dinner, but my dad is sick and it seems like it might be Covid, so they didn’t come. Dad, I hope you get feeling better!

We wanted to still make it feel festive for Mary by having a somewhat large gathering, so we sent out some texts and happily for us, the Marshall’s were available to come over!

We had the most wonderful time chatting with them. Derek’s mother passed away recently which was very sad, but he and the family seem to be doing well. Also, their dog passed away recently, but they bought a new puppy that looks just like their previous dog (Red Golden Retriever) and they brought her, Dakota, to play with Basil. See below!

For dinner we had Lou Malnati’s pizza (ordered and shipped to our house), salad, cake, and cookies that the Marshall’s brought over. It was delicious!

We had such a great time with the Marshall’s! Here is everyone singing to Mary!

When the Marhall’s left, Mary opened some presents that she got from Georgia over Facetime. They were two sketch-pads and a book about how to draw. Thank you Georgia!

After all the festivities, Mary and I took some pizza and cake to Cindy, our friend across the street. Lydia and Mary love talking to Cindy and they have become friends with her. We invited Cindy to the party, but she didn’t make it because she was working on a contract for selling her travel trailer. When we dropped off the food, she had a gift bag for Mary with water-balloons and a 3-D puzzle in it! Thank you Cindy!

It was sooooo fun celebrating our sweet Mary today. She is creative, helpful, sweet, responsible, smart, hard working and so adorable. Here is something I photographed while I was cleaning. She made it a few weeks ago:

I also want to mention Lydia did an amazing job getting her harp finished off for the week without anyone asking her, and for getting her homework done before looking at screens. She’s really on a roll!

Today Clarissa and Ammon played at the park while Lydia and Mary had tennis practice. I love the video below of Clarissa having fun on the zip line.

After dinner, I played magnetiles with Ammon and Clarissa. It was so fun, and we did a little dancing/throwing kids when we were done!

At night, I caught Lily reading to Ammon and Clarissa, as she so often does, and I grabbed a quick video of it. I love how much she reads to our children!

This backpacking trip was a complete dream come true for me. I’ve been dying to backpack with the family, and it has felt difficult to pull off from a scheduling, and weather perspective, but we finally made it happen. Even still it almost didn’t happen because Lily tripped and fell an uneven piece of cement at night the night before. I went to bed thinking it wasn’t going to happen, but in the morning Lily felt ok going forward. We bought her ice packs and an ankle brace. I was very worried about having her hike on it, and it did hurt and it was sore, but from what we can tell, her ankle did ok. That was really the only concern. The rest of the trip was pure bliss for me.

The only other semi-concern was that we drank way more water than I expected (probably about 16 bottles work) getting into camp. I had brought a filter as a backup, so I left camp before 6AM to go a little over a mile up the trail to filter water for all of our bottles for the trek home. I’d never used the filter before and it was a gravity system that took a very long time, but fortunately I got back before Lily started to worry. It was fun to be out on a survival mission for my family (running out of water would have been a huge problem!)

This is campsite 6. We were in campsite 4. Campsite 6 has a nice area in the stream for dipping, so took the picture here for future reference. I had to go to the spring by campsite 7 for water pumping though because apparently this stream has bacteria in it that can’t be filtered out and it’s very dangerous to drink in significant quantities.

Back at camp, Lily was already packing up and getting the camp ready to go, which was a huge help! Before packing up, I took sentimental pictures of our cooking area (the tuna casserole was soooo good last night!) and took videos of the kids singing and dancing in the tent. I don’t know what I love more, the singing and dancing or the smile on Lily’s face while she’s watching them.

While I finished packing up camp, Lily took the kids to the river where they had a wonderful time playing.

Then we hiked back. Hiking back was easier from the standpoint that most people’s packs were lighter, and I did a better job distributing weight according to people’s abilities. It was also easier from the standpoint of knowing the trail. But it was much much much harder from the standpoint that now we were mostly hiking up, instead of mostly hiking down. The family did amazing. I am so proud of them! Part of what I love about backpacking so much is you don’t just get a beautiful immersive experience in nature and the people you are with, but at the end of it, you all feel proud for achieving something difficult. I’m so proud of how everyone did! Part of what made the way back doable was we took a few nice long luxurious breaks.

This was our longest break, and Clarissa took a full 20-30 minute nap.

After finishing we went and got ice-cream at a gas station. This was one of my favorite experiences I have EVER had with my wonderful family. Thank you all for going with me!

I had fun driving Ammon and Clarissa to school for their first day together. Ammon was so cute and was singing Skidamerinky-Dinky Dee:

And here are some pictures from during Lydia and Mary’s tennis practice, including a picture of the one of the daughters of the family that Lily and the kids have become friends with at tennis practice.

Today Lydia sweetly helped Clarissa learn to ride on her training wheels.

We passed the afternoon at a school park near out house. The weather was great, and the school had beautiful sunflowers.

Today, I took the kids to a church parking lot and worked on helping Clarissa learn how to ride her bike:

Today Lily was super productive and among many other things made a very nice lunch for the kids. I made a plate from the spread as well, but unfortunately, I didn’t eat much because I’ve had a stomach bug today and didn’t have much appetite.

The highlight of my day was at dinner when Lydia spontaneously announced that she loved her family. It made me so incredibly happy to hear that. Clarissa confessing the Lily that she accidentally ate all the m&ms was a close second.

Fish Lake

Today we left in the morning to drive to Fish Lake. We have never been and Lily and I were so excited to check it out. On the way down, we listened to an amazing podcast I found about the Pando Forest. Usually Lily is the one finding amazing stuff to listen to in the car (her last hit was Hemmingway stories to listen to in Florida). I was glad I could contribute on this front for once! On the podcast we learned that at fish lake, the Aspens and Conifers fight against each other for survival. Lately, the Aspens haven’t been doing so well for 3 reasons. 1. Human activity like roads, campgrounds etc is a nuisance to the aspens. 2. The killing off of natural predators like bears and wolves a hundred years ago has lead to a surplus population of mule-dear that is eating all the baby aspen and 3, the lack of fires in the last hundred years (when humans have been diligent and capable of stopping forest fires), has hurt the aspen, because aspen thrive in fire. They have a relatively wet bark (that is even a bit green and can photosynthesize) so they don’t burn well, and when they do burn, the shoot up tons of new baby trees in the area that was burned, and because of their interconnected root systems, they can send nourishment to those new trees, even bringing them water from miles away, passing water through the roots. Speaking of interconnected roots, the Pando Aspen forest (which we drove through and camped in) is the largest and oldest living organism on the earth (could be 50,000 years old). It’s the largest living organism because all the trees in the forest are clones and for the most part connected by the same root system. Pando is dying because of the reasons mentioned above. We also learned that aspen leaves quake (making a beautiful rustling sound) because their stems are flat instead of round. Here is the sound of aspens from our hike later in the day:

Once we arrived in Fish Lake, we had lunch at the Fish Lake Lodge. It was yummy and the kids got ice cream!

Then we set off on a hike to Pelican point (where Pelicans stop during their migration, but we didn’t see any) and also just followed the trail along the lake.

Weather started to get a little rough when we arrived at Pelican point which was on a high mountain plateau. Lily wisely suggested we go lower so we then went to a lower trail that went around the lake. We followed it for a little over a mile each way. Ammon was scared of lightening and even hugged a tree telling the tree to “be safe”. But then the weather cleared up, and we had the most unbelievable second half of our hike. Literally one of the prettiest and happiest hikes we’ve ever been on. We even sang happy birthday to Clarissa and let her blow out a massive dandylion (or whatever it was):

Of course others wanted a turn 🙂

After all we learned from our podcast, it was really fun to notice things in the forest like the age of the trees (young trees mean the forest will have a future) as well as the struggle between the conifers and the aspen:

After the hike we set up camp and I heated up the stew that I stayed up late making the night before.

It was an absolute hit, everyone LOVED it!

And Clarissa and Ammon were very cute playing badmitten

Clarissa and Ammon told Lily about candy world:

Then we all went to bed. Our view was unbelievable. We saw trees before it got completely dark, and when it got completely dark our view of the stars was breathtaking. Poor Lily didn’t sleep very well (as in barely at all).

Today, Lily and I used our new gallon bottles to motivate us to drink more water. Lily didn’t start until noon, but still pulled it off. I drank my whole gallon too, and made many many trips to the bathroom. Yay for hydration.

Also, Mary practiced the piano for 5 hours today and learned a new piece for the second day in a row. I will also note that Lydia did an awesome job self-starting on getting her harp done today. Go girls!

Also, Lydia stumbled upon my Greek God costume and begged me to wear it when I finished work. I obliged, and it turned into a full-fledged costume party for the evening.

Today Lydia passed the time by taking pictures of Clarissa. Here are two of my favorite ones she took: