Natural Bridge Caverns

All four children were able to sleep on a queen-size air mattress while we were camping something strange happened in Texas. Suddenly Nathan found it impossible to sleep on a queen-size mattress with Alynna. My usually very sweet little boy was in near hysterics that first night over sleeping in the same bed with his sister. He lay there screaming that he could sleep with anyone but Alynna. It was the oddest thing! Nothing amount of threatening would make him stop, so, after a time of him "crying it out", I finally took Alynna out of the bedroom until he fell asleep. It was almost 11:00pm and his loud blubbering was keeping everyone awake and poor Alynna had to lay there being verbally abused by her usual playmate.

In about ten minutes Nathan had fallen asleep, so I put Alynna back to bed. I chocked the crazies up to exhaustion and excitement of the trip.

The very next day Dad went to work and my mom took us to Natural Bridge Caverns. This was the first time the kids were in a cave. They did pretty well. They found the sights very interesting and beautiful.

Nathan was on an over-the-top fascination with catching bugs. After learning from our tour guide the only bugs in these caverns were blind and translucent daddy-long-legs and cave crickets that's all we heard about for the next hour. Any time the woman said, "Are there any questions?" Nathan's hand would shoot into the air. "Yes! Do the spiders have eyes? They can't see!?! But do they have eyes?" And after learning what "translucent" meant he wanted to know if they could be seen by a little boy like him. And if they were translucent how could anyone see them.
"Any questions?"
"Yes! I have a question! How do you catch cave crickets? Are they invisible too? Where do you find them?" He was quite humorous.

Down in the caverns what choice did I have but to take tons of pictures of stalagmites and stalactites due to their great beauty. However, once the awesome pictures were downloaded onto the computer they were no loner so awesome. They were just a bunch of average pictures of brown rocks.

After listening to Simon scream, "Bat poop!" over and over and over again it finally occurred to me that he was acting tired. The great news is the super-fidgety boy stopped yelling about guano and fell asleep on my shoulder during the hour cave tour. The bad news is he fell asleep on my shoulder during an hour cave tour! Dead weight over 80-something steep stairs down and dead weight over 80-something steep stair back up.

Nathan usually makes friends with all of our tour guides. This time I was surprised it took him until the very end of the tour to hold Steven, our tour guide, hand. I think that might be a record.