Camping Trip

Well, it’s been two months since our trip out west, so I suppose we can no longer use it as an excuse that we don’t need to write a newsletter. :-) We decided to start putting our newsletters on a blog, just to make them more accessible to everyone. Hopefully it works all right. It should also allow us to include videos!



A lot has happened since the last newsletter, so I’ll just skim over the highlights. Our trip out to Utah and Washington was a blast, and it was great to see everyone and show off Kaela. After returning we spent the 4th of July in Boston with Kevin, a friend from school, and his wife Allison. The fireworks were incredible and it was altogether a great experience. Unfortunately there wasn’t much wind, so by about half way through the show there was so much smoke up in the sky that we couldn’t see the fireworks any more (they really lit off a ton of them!).


My life for the last few months has been divided between doing research at school during the weeks and working in a clinic on Saturdays. My research has really been coming along, so much so that in the last few weeks it looks like I finally may have come across a topic for my Masters Thesis. I will be studying the optics of the eye and what sort of things contribute to people becoming myopic. Other than that, on Saturdays I work in a clinic, mostly just to get more experience and exposure with patients. Life is busy, but it’s fun.


Kristin has been having lots of fun as well. Over the summer she’s been getting more involved as a Cub Scout leader. She’s also really enjoyed being a full time mom, and this week she’s been able to come help me at the clinic where I work on Saturdays. So yeah, life is good, if not particularly eventful.



Kaela is doing great – well, there are lots of hard times when Kaela cries a lot and we can’t figure out what she wants, but those are evened out by the times when she smiles and laughs and plays. Yes, she’s gotten to the point now where she laughs a lot. She also LOVES the jumper that Grandpa & Grandma Andelin sent – she’ll spend 45 minutes twirling around, jumping, bouncing, and having a blast. It’s so much fun to watch.




Anyway, on to the biggest events of the last few weeks. Our most recent large project has been refinishing a kitchen table! We helped Kevin and Allison move around the end of July, and the previous tenants left behind an old table. We figured our kitchen table was always too small for us to have company, and this one looked a little bigger, so we asked if we could have it. Upon closer examination, we discovered that it extended out to about 12 feet! So over the last three weeks or so, in short snippets of spare time, we’ve managed to strip off all the finish, sand, stain, and re-varnish the table. It’s been a fun project to do together, and now the table looks so nice even we don’t recognize it!



The second large event to report is our first family camping trip last week. We drove up to New Hampshire, listening to The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Holmes) on the way, and spent two nights in the White Mountains. The first night we got there it had recently rained, so the firewood was wet, and we ended up opening our tinfoil dinners and converting them into a stir-fry on the camp stove. Shortly thereafter we surrendered to impulse and drove into the one-stop-light town that was 5 miles away and bought a $5 bundle of firewood so that we could cook marshmallows. We ended up making “Mexican s’mores”, which consist of marshmallows, chocolate, and peanut butter rolled up in a tortilla and wrapped in tin foil and placed in the fire. They were all right, but not as good as the banana boats we made later.



Unfortunately, we hadn’t checked the weather, and the first night ended up being no fun. It was super cold, so we bundled Kaela up in about 6 layers. The next morning, shivering, we awoke to find that she’d exploded in her diaper and all 6 layers had suffered . But we got up, had a superb omelet breakfast, and went hiking up Mt. Sugarloaf. While it might not compare to some of our Rocky Mountains (topping out at only about 1000 ft. above sea level), it was a great hike and a good view from the top. When we got back we managed to get a nice fire going and cook super-hotdogs. :-) Oh, and the biggest, coolest part of the whole trip was that the second night, when we were trying to get Kaela to go to sleep in the tent, she started rolling over. She just kept on doing it, like 15 times in a row, every time that we’d put her on her back! Ever since, it has become her new trick. She doesn’t always like it, though – sometimes she’ll roll over onto her tummy and just start crying. Go figure.



Anyway, right now I’m getting ready for classes to start up on Tuesday. The first week of classes will bring our white coat ceremony – that’s where they give us a white clinical coat and tell us that we can officially do clinical work on real patients. It’s a big mile marker, and they have a really nice dinner for us.

Well, we’ll try to post more on here in the future. Hopefully more regularly. We love you all, enjoy the videos and the pictures, and we’ll talk to you all later!

Lee, Kristin, and Kaela Johnson