The last few years have been rough. We rarely have had time to do things as a family. So, with Brian out of school, we decided to try taking the kiddos camping. We bought all new camping gear, I took work off, we borrowed Grandpa Bennion's truck and we took to the mountains. We went to a little campground just past Kamas and immediately set up the tent. The kids instantly made it their home away from home.
Shortly after we got there, a nice older couple at the next campground gave us a little popup tent that we put up as a "game room". Connect4 was a hit with Skeeto.
Thanks to the extra room in Grandpa's truck, I was able to bring my guitar -- truthfully, one of the only things that makes camping bearable for me. There's nothing like singing with your family next to a campfire. After this, we had an awesome dutch oven meatloaf from Chef Brian and finished off the night with the all-too-important smores with the biggest marshmallows I have ever seen. It was great.
Here's where it gets less great. Okay, it gets horrible. Worst-day-of-your-life horrible. Before we went to bed, I noticed Skeeto's voice was getting a little funny. Izzypop had had a cold last week so we were preparing for a fairly sleepless night with another kid with a cough. What we were not prepared for was having to throw everything in the truck as fast as we could at first light in order to get Skeeto to Primary Children's Hospital before he stopped breathing. Brian took Izzypop and I home before rushing Skeeto to the hospital. After Grandpa B came to take Iz to his house, I went up to the hospital and found my sweet little guy in the ICU looking like this:
The doctors diagnosed a nasty case of croup. His airway had almost closed up completely and he was having a really hard time getting any air at all. They pumped him full of steroids and were giving him epinephrine every hour. We spent all day and all night Friday in the ICU trying to get Skeeto's body to respond to something....anything.
Finally around midnight Friday, he started to come through. He slept really well and Saturday morning he was doing much better. One thing I know for sure is that I will never underestimate the medicinal powers of popsicles again.
Later Saturday afternoon, they moved us out of the ICU and into a private room where we could watch cartoons in peace. He did so well on Saturday that they let us go home right after breakfast Sunday morning.
We are so grateful that Skeeto was able to get through this (shout out to the big guy upstairs!), but needless to say that by the end of this weekend, no one was a happy camper........you can thank Brian for that lame joke ;)
