Caving/Birthdays/Mother's Day

Ben had been planning on going to Idaho this past weekend to hang out with his family, and I secretly wanted to go, but felt guilty sneaking out of Zach and Eric's birthday party and the mother's day celebration. As I made my lame list of weekend to-do's, I realized the extremely high level of boredom and invited myself to Idaho. I made sure that my plans would allow me to make it back in time for Sunday dinner/birthday celebration/mother's day hoorah.
Once we made it to Idaho, we all stayed at Ben's brother Dallon's (or is it Dallyn?) house. On Saturday we drove out to some lava rock and climbed all around for hours looking at different caves. In one of the caves, Anth yanked a sleeping bat off of the ceiling, carefully climbed out, and paraded around with it. The poor little bat was blinking like crazy, and now and then his huge ears would stick straight up. Shudder ... they look exactly like gremlins. Doesn't Anth know about rabies? Plus, on closer (but still safe) inspection, the little guy had spiders crawling on him. Blech. It was really fun to make use of my insanely convenient head lamp inside the caves. The bats flew all around us, there wasn't a crazy amount of them, but I definitely ducked my head and gasped a few times. As we were duck-crawling our way out, I spotted a sleeping bat. Ben soon pointed out that there were two.
"Where's the other one?"
"Right above you."
It was practically nestling into my hair. I had completely missed it.
Dallon's youngest, Hailey, totally super-manned it on the lava rock. Poor tyke. She had scraped all up her arms and her little belly. I saw Brandi step on a prickly pear, but she didn't even flinch, so I decided against pointing out what had just happened. In another cave, Rachel accidentally sliced her hand as she tried to pull herself out. She was laughing pretty hard later as she told us that when she was walking around trying to get sympathy, showing everyone her cut, Hailey pulled up her sleeves with, "Me too, mommy." Rachel's wound was pathetic next to those bad boys.
Blazer's cave required a ladder in order to drop down inside. It was one big open room, and apparently, scouts camp out there all of the time. Ben showed off and pulled himself out of the cave without the ladder; he's a spectacular climber. So then Dallon had to try, but before he got to it, he whined for quite awhile about exposing his big white belly. Then Anth's son Austin decided to try to pull himself out without having to turn around backwards. These guys were amazing. Soon I was lifting every little kid up so that they too could try.

Poor Anth punctured two of his fingers when he tried to move a rock out of his motor bike's path. I missed the actual process of getting hurt, but I did make it in time to see the blood pouring down his hand. The kids had drained my camelback so I was of no help when I squoze air on his open wound. We located a water bottle, rinsed him off, Dallon pulled out his whiskey and burned away the badness, and I cringed for Anth. Rachel had been worried the whole trip about how we hadn't brought a first aid kit, but she managed to rummage up two bandaids.

Next, we caravaned to a crater. As we pulled around a corner, we saw the motorbikes struggling to get up a steep dirt road. Austin was almost all the way there, but he ended up pushing his bike the rest of the way. Brandi didn't try on hers, and Dallon was already up and over. Dallon came back down, and I rolled down my window and asked him if he wanted us to drive his little pickup up to the top. Rachel yelled "No!" while Dallon was yelling, "Why not?"

Dallon hopped in, so the three of us rode to the top. I was terrified that we were going to roll over backwards, and Ben might have bruises on his left shoulder to prove it. Once we got over the ridge, Dallon pulled really hard to the left. The crater was right there. I immediately closed my eyes. What if Ben had driven us up? We had to go fast enough to make it up, and we didn't know that the crater was right there, we probably would have crashed straight down the steep crater.

This is way too long, and I keep needing breaks. Again, more later.