a couple deep breaths and a happy place...

It isn't looking like the school district is going to budge in letting Gwen into the school close to our house. We went ahead and enrolled her into the next best school (which isn't too much further, but still). When we showed up to enroll her there, they started to give us a hard time about not being able to verify if our address was in their district or not... I live right on the border of 3 school districts- the 1st, Sorensen, is a magnate school and the best in town; the 2nd, Fernan, is the second best school but it's big...; the 3rd is Bryan, and I believe that school is ghetto, even though Kobe has been attending and seems to like it, I do not want Gwen going there (I had a bad experience helping out in one of Tays classrooms where the teacher had to double check with me on the spelling of "ghost".) So, the lady at Fernan was telling me I had to enroll her in Bryan because I lived right at the border. I just about reached over the desk and strangled her at this point. I pointed out that just because you live near the Canadian border, it does not make you Canadian. I am just barely in the district, but I am in. So help her if she does not enroll my daughter. I finally had to have her pull up the school districts website and zoom way way in on their attendance zone map and pointed out that my address was purple, signifying we were in zone. She honestly seemed disappointed for not being able to hand me my walking papers... argh- the bureaucrat. So, long story short, Gwen now has a school to start come Sept. 8. Thank goodness I had yet to pull the tags off of the uniforms and was able to exchange them for more normal looking school garb. I am still annoyed about the whole process... but I left town and spent a couple of very rejuvenating days camping and hiking and am feeling much more able to cope with everything. Ahhh- the healing properties of nature and no cell service!!! I am in love with this new camping area. It was right on the river. The spot we camped in bordered an area shallow enough that I didn't have to worry about Gwen playing in it unsupervised, but if you followed it down far enough, there was a really nice swimming area. Gorgeous hiking all around- one to a series of waterfalls and one through an old growth cedar forest. Amazing. Jack was cracking us all up hiking. He was just bounding up and down the trail, up and down the mountain side- happy as a clam. In the cedar forest there were a lot of felled trees- many that had been re purposed into bridges, and Jack was loving running across them! If we walked past one, he'd perch his little paws up on the stump and look at me asking me to lift him up onto it. I'd stick him up and he'd trot down to the end and turn around and come back. Gwen did amazing climbing the root side of one giant that had fallen over. She even got some dirt in her eye at one point and almost lost her handholds, but didn't panic and continued the climb! We found the cutest rock cairn that I have ever seen! It even had a hat on! We found a little waterfall at the end that Taylor and I jumped off of. The water was FREEZING!!! but so worth it. I am already itching to go back! I'm hoping for an Indian summer that we can fit in some more camping before the chill sets in.