My Summer - circa 1981: guest post by Jodi Klippenes

Recently Alli and Grant spent the night at my Mom and Terry's house to celebrate their spring birthdays.  Mom cooked a giant meal and added up their collective ages (15 +12) and put the number 27 into their birthday pie.  They played cards, watched a movie, ate a giant breakfast, and went to the skate park to watch Grant work on tricks.

Alli (12 years) and Grant (15 years) = 27

Mom and Alli also went through old photo albums and memorabilia.  Alli had a riot taking photos of awful Growing Up photos of me and texting them to me.  "Just came across these pictures mom. ))); Makes me laugh.  I love it so much. It's hilarious.  I bet you were great at basketball."

She even came home with some samples of creative writing that I did in 2nd grade.  I had very neat penmanship, really bad spelling, and was exclamation point happy.  Why use a period or a question mark if you can exclaim it?

My essay on a summer memory told about a camping trip.  While on that trip we took a hike that went terribly wrong.  We got lost and ended up hiking ten miles, a big part of it through a creek.  My brother and I both hated it and spent a ton of time crying our eyes out because we were tired, hungry, and our legs hurt. I remember scrambling up the cliff out of the canyon and crying so much that my Dad had to carry me for a while.  This did not make him happy, but it stopped my crying. Apparently my six year old self forgot about the hiking misery much quicker, because I chose this camping trip as my "favorite days of the summer."  LOL!  

I remember this hike EVERY.SINGLE.TIME my own kids start crying and lamenting that they just might die when we're hiking. And then I tell them the story about how we got lost and I had to hike ten miles when I was six and how lucky they are to have a backpack with water and food and emergency supplies, etc.

I think this photo shows Shane and I around the ages we were when we took this hike

We're a little older in this photo, but look at Shane rocking those shorts.

Here we are on a hike - much older than 7 and 9 years old and definitely in the awkward stage.  #forthelove

Normally by this time in the spring I've been hiking a least a handful of times, but this year I haven't had the chance yet, until the last couple of days.  I thought I'd kick off hiking season with a guest post from my seven-year-old self, spelling purposely not corrected.  For your reading pleasure, here is... 

My Summer

by Jodi Klippenes  

7 years old

My favorite days of the summer were when we went camping!  We went to Backbone State Park.  We used the Hammonds traler.  We picked out 76. It was butaful!! We hiked 10 miles! It was hard, but fun.  We saw Muskrat tracks. We waded for a hour and a half.  And got no were! We climed a real real real high cliff.  When we waded we saw a real baby crab!  The water was fresing! It wasn't realy wading because when we went in the shalois part it went real high, so we went over.  My pants were sopt!  I fell onece.  We went swiming too.  It was fun! We rosted marsmellows. It was fun! Then we went to sleep!  Redy for the next day! The next day is when we did all the fun!  We saw a waterfall.  We had picnic lunch! that was fun.  W also went to see a new born baby.  It was 5 ponds.  It went down to 4 somethig. It was the first baby and let us hold it. 

Don't you want to go hiking now?  Or hold a newborn baby?