Question of the week: What was your most memorable summer vacation?

Annette of pickles*and*co writes:

Thinking back, it's really hard for me to narrow down my families' experiences to just ONE most memorial summer vacation. Life for us is a series of events that my family tends to treat as adventures. :) I LOVE summer. We complain about the heat and the bugs, and we mom's sometimes even say (gasp) that we just "can't wait" for the kids to go back to school. But we miss it when it's over. If you count the summers that you have to enjoy with your kids, there really aren't that many...assuming that they DO eventually fly the coop.

I have a few summer vacations that stand out in my mind but I'll choose this one. The summer that I was pregnant with Paityn, and Cassidy was 3 1/2-yrs-old, we took a camping trip across the southern part of Oklahoma and the southwest corner of Arkansas. Probably tent camping is not a good recommendation for a pregnant woman, but despite the aches and pains, we had THE BEST time!!! We fished, we hiked, we skipped rocks, we huddled up together in the rain hoping our tent didn't float away, we made Smores, and we watched raccoons come up under our chairs to steal our marshmallows. Camp food is THE best...or maybe that was just the desperately hungry pregnant woman in me, but I swear....that week we had the best food I'd ever had in my LIFE!!!! Most of all though, we made a great memory. :)

Shortly thereafter, Paityn came along, and we've had many memorable vacations since. We take them when we can get them. Sometimes they're only a long-weekend when we can catch one here and there, sometimes, when we're fortunate enough, they're longer...sometimes they're with our extended family, and sometimes it's just the four of us. Sometimes they're in a tent, sometimes they're in a comfortable hotel in the downtown of a major city, but wherever they are and however long they last, we try to make a new memory for the memory bank as often as we can.