My mother’s side of the family has a cabin in the Uinta mountains.  My great grandparents started building it in the 1950′s.  The past couple of years my parents have been going up every weekend during the summers and fixing it up for all the generations of the family to be able to enjoy it again.  The past couple weekends I went up with the kids and Magpie to help out and this weekend we even got to take Deeds cousin from Houston with us.

Deeds and his “best girl buddy” Magpie the miracle service dog.

We have never taken Deeds up before because I was terrified.  Loosing him in a public place is frightening but you can usually enlist a lot of help to look for him.  Loosing him where there is nothing but vast wilderness and no cell phone coverage to call for help was something that I wasn’t willing to risk.  Now that we have Magpie and Deeds is getting older we decided it was time.  We even did a practice track while we were there to make sure Maggie could still find her boy out in the woods.

Deeds was so excited that he finished this puzzle all by himself!

Little sister painting and being a goof.

He calls this his “Spelling learning game”

The kids had a lot of fun playing games, doing puzzles and watching Disney movies while we were inside.  We would go for walks outside and it became quickly apparent that Deeds is not a huge fan of the great outdoors.  He never wanted to go for walks but once we got down to the water he would always have a lot of fun with Magpie playing fetch or throwing rocks into the creek.

Little sister LOVES being outside.

Deeds laughing as Magpie sticks her entire head under the water.

One day another family was also down by the creek and Magpie thought it was Christmas since they had two dogs and she got to play with them for a while.  She hasn’t been able to run and play that much since we were at training at 4 Paws.  Every once in a while I would randomly call out a command to make sure she was still aware we were still there and she would come bounding back with her tail wagging.  I’d praise her, Deeds would giggle and give her a treat and then we would let her jump back into the cold water to play some more.  It was a really great weekend.

Rock throwing, look at that form!

Beware the flying dogs!

You do NOT want to be standing next to Magpie when she is shaking off the water.

Deeds showed his cousin his favorite “biggest rock”

On the way home we took a little stop by the Provo River Falls.  They are beautiful and I promised Deeds cousin she could get some pictures by them.  About a half an hour later in the car as we were driving Deeds started to scream that he couldn’t find his blankie.  My heart sank and I pulled over to look around the car.  Sure enough it wasn’t there.  I could flip through the pictures on my phone and see exactly where he had it one second and not the next.  We turned around to drive back and prayed it would still be there.  My little guy was beyond upset and I was dealing with a great deal of anxiety about it myself.  Lucky for us someone had found it on the trail, folded it up and placed it on a rock.  I’ve never seen such a look of relief on Deeds face.  There is a new rule that the blankie doesn’t come out of the car unless mommy or daddy has it.  Since it’s what he hides under when he is overstimulated it’s more than just a comfort thing for him.  I’m so thankful that someone was nice enough to pick it up for us and set it somewhere we would see it.

All the cousins on the trail right before we lost blankie.

Provo River Falls

Deeds and Magpie checking out the falls. It was a beautiful day.