Friday Family Drama and Saturday Family Fun

"Hold up," you say. "Saturday Family Fun? What is this 'Saturday' nonsense? And what Friday drama? WHAT KIND OF CRAZINESS IS GOING ON OVER THERE?"

Oh, you didn't say that? I'll explain, anyway.

Charlie and Cubby had school this Friday so they would have the day to prepare for . . .

All the world's a stage, you know. 

That was the school play. And incidentally, that group on the stage there? That is the entire school. Well, except the preschoolers, which is why Jack wasn't in it. But that small group in the photo is all the students from kindergarten to 12th grade.

I still have trouble wrapping my head around that one.

Anyway.

The reason they have a school play at such a tiny school is because of a program through the Missoula Children's Theater that sends two guys around in a pick-up truck crammed with all the costumes and "set" (essentially some decorated sheets and boxes, plus sound equipment) to spend a week at small schools like this one rehearsing and staging a play.

They travel to a new school every week and do this. In all fifty states. How exhausting. But great for the kids, because there is no way there would be any kind of drama program in a school this small otherwise.

The play was something entitled "The Snow Queen," and I couldn't follow the plot at all. That may have been because I spent most of the play chasing around a crawling baby and bored three-year-old. I did know that Cubby was a robber and Charlie was a snow chicken.

Yes, a snow chicken. Like I said, it didn't make a lot of sense.

It was fun anyway, though, and Cubby and Charlie both did very well with their songs and so forth.

So that's why there wasn't a Friday Family Fun adventure.

But we couldn't let a whole weekend go by without some kind of Family Fun, could we? Of course not!

Saturday Family Fun it is; canyon, here we come.

We went to the one closest to our house this time. It happens to be the canyon in which Rafael's ranch is located, and is thus the mythical source of the mysterious calabacitas*.

Rafael had shown A. a swimming hole at the bottom of this canyon, so we told the kids to wear shorts and sandals. We really should have known better.

This isn't a state park or something. There isn't even a real trail to get to the swimming hole. There is, instead, a slightly-more-clear path through the cacti to get to the swimming pool. Luckily, no one fell in a prickly pear. Unluckily, the swimming hole really was a hole and far too deep for the children to safely swim in.

Thus, Cubby tried fishing in it:

Because this boy has never seen a body of water he doesn't want to throw a hook into.

The other three played in some sand nearby:

In the shade, even.

And why was that particular spot so fortuitously shaded? Because I used my very body (and an unneeded-for-swimming towel) to shade them:

I call this "A Portrait of Motherhood."

We were only down there for about fifteen minutes before Poppy insisted on trying to crawl around into the pricker bushes and rocks, so we hiked back up.

Can you see the path? No? That's because there isn't one.

Where the brave van was, as always, waiting for us:

Another good one for my (non-existent) Adventure Van Instagram page.

We drove all the way through the canyon to where it met back up with the paved road and came back home. It was a relatively short adventure this time, but it got everyone out of the house for a couple of hours. 

I'm sure we'll make up for the brevity of this trip with some sort of epic all-day Drive of Dread next Friday, but for a Saturday adventure on a short weekend (as a two-day weekend now seems to us spoiled three-day-weekend people), this was just right.

* I think I've identified them for real, but this post is already too long, so you'll have to wait for the big reveal. Hold on to the edges of those seats now.