Yellowstone Part 4- Lots of Hikes

So the next few days were great fun as well. We saw most of the animals in the North part of the park, but we managed to see plenty down in Old Faithful's neighborhood as well. We hiked the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and drove around Yellowstone Lake. The kids had a fabulous time! Both Cliff and I were surprised at how well Kaiah did. She never complained, her blood sugars were perfect the whole time and she had lots of stamina. What a trooper! Mason did pretty well too, and the little ones were in the back packs. Here are a some of my favorite shots:

We went back to our campsite every night and enjoyed the fire and Cliff's scary bear stories or earthquake memoirs of when the very campsite we were staying in was the burial site for like 23 people or something...

In the mornings I was up with Lochlan at 6 am because it was a 1 hour time zone difference and he thought it was still 7. So we had the whole place to ourselves pretty much. I would make his bottle and go over the hill to look at the beautiful river. There was usually some kind of wildlife there. I saw several elk and a buffalo. I surprised the latter and L.T. and I found ourselves about 30 feet away from him. I just froze and he stopped walking. I was a little nervous he would feel threatened and charge me (after all, everywhere we turned there were warnings about people getting gored in the rear by a bison). But he turned toward us, lowered his hairy, bearded mouth, gave us one loud grunt, stared at us some more and kept walking. As Mason would say, "That was a pheewf!" I didn't get a shot of the bison, but here are some of the cow elks.

We also drove around part of Yellowstone Lake and took in some more hot springs.

One of the evenings, we stopped along a beautiful stretch of the river to have a lovely picnic dinner with our two families. The river was peaceful and winding around a bend, the children froliced to and fro, a herd of Elk was grazing nearby and it promised to be something out of a fairy tale story book, until....

3 of the children needed to go to the bathroom and "could not" do it in the great outdoors. Cliff refused to take Bria to an outhouse (he's repulsed by them). Tony got lost or something happened that took a VERY long time. Ashley and I cooked dinner while we waited for them to get back. Cliff did, but Tony was gone forever! So we ate without Tony and the kids. All their food got cold, and then IT happened.

Lochlan was getting fussy, so Cliff picked him up. Bad idea. He had blown out his pants in a major way, getting the car seat, all of his clothes, Cliff's clothes and up and down his (Locke's :) back and legs requiring a complete diaper change. Only, we didn't have any extra diaper. Or wipes (but thankfully Ashley did). OR a change of clothes.... (Now would be a perfect time to insert pictures of the events that unfolded, but Cliff made me delete them.) We set our dirty naked baby down in the grass and cleaned up the best that we could. We wrapped him in a towel, cleaned the baby seat as much as possible, and covered up the important parts with a thick wad of paper towels. Then we left our beautiful winding river and the unfinished fairy tale as fast as we could. This was not one of our finest moments as parents. How could we forget everything?? I'm not really sure. But I do sure hope that never happens again!

God has a sense of humor and for that we are thankful. He also blesses us when we feel frustrated. On our way back, we saw a really fun (for us) thing. I'll let the pics do the talking. It was a nice way to end the long drive!