This last weekend, we went camping about 3 hours away at a place called Jocassee lake. It was beautiful. That is one thing about South Carolina...you never run out of beautiful places to visit. Andy has been wanting to camp for a long time now. Once I had Stella - I made a no camping rule until she was sleeping through the night. Well...now that that is finally the likely thing - we can go camping. Andy did a wonderful job of cooking, and taking care of Stella and I out in the woods. Stella really enjoyed "eating" the little pebbles that were all over the place. I had to watch her like a hawk. I couldn't really put her down, because crawling on the gravel was scraping her knees, and so my arms were tired by the end of the whole thing. We had a good time though - and next time will stay longer than just a night since it is such a ways a way.








You may notice that in many of the pictures Stella is staring off into the distance. There were two dogs at the site next to ours - and Stella is obsessed. She obviously takes after her Dad, and LOVES dogs. She is going to probably be the kind that begs for a puppy every Christmas. Everytime we got close to the dogs - her entire body would tense up and she would hold her breath and her mouth would drop wide open. She had such a good time being outside so much. So much fun in fact, that her already intense dis-like of sleep became even more apparent. She crawled around our tent for two hours while we were trying desperately to get her to bed. We did everything to try to help her see that it was time to drift off into dreamland including faking asleep ourselves. None of this worked and she wanted nothing to do with sleep when she was enjoying herself so much. At one point she was so sleepy, she was crawling around the tent with her head dragging on the floor because she had no strength left to hold it up. Shortly after this happened, we pulled her close to us, and Andy started rubbing her back, while I was rubbing her cheek and ear. This often calms her down. And sure enough, it worked this time...and she fell asleep sitting up, so we had to gently move her down to where she would be comfortable.




Andy had the chance to do a little fishing while we were there. We also went swimming in the lake. It was soooo cold - so I only got in to my waist - but Andy was flippin around all over. Stella would lift her legs all the way up as we lowered her down, because she did not want to get wet - but after a while she was addicted to the water - and kept crawling towards it.




























The lake was only recently dammed, and underneath there is an old church and cemetery where a lot of people scuba dive. Andy and I want to dive here before we leave for sure. We have never dove in a lake - because it seems kind of boring, especially after cancun, but it would be cool to go into an underground church! A little weird to see graves under water - but probably more cool than freaky.