Should there come a time when I camp with the boys alone in the near future, I will take the smaller tent. We will all three sleep together on the air mattress in a big two-sleeping-bags-made-into-one-sleeping-bag and then someone (whose name starts with J) will not wake up in the middle of the night and refuse to sleep for two solid hours.
Who, me?
I’d like to pretend that the lack of sleep didn’t ruin my whole day, but it sorta did.
Yum, pancakes!
We had a wonderful family picnic (aren’t reunions great? This family has been having one for over fifty years, reuniting my grandmother and her seven siblings, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and probably some great-great-grandchildren by now!), but the pall of a screaming toddler trying to wake the whole campground between 3:30 and 5:30 am on Sunday was hard to shake off.
Charles got to swim in the lake (there were no warnings of Goose Poop Bacteria this year, yippee!), we went for a run/bike ride, and there were so many marshmallows consumed it’s a wonder my children could unstick their lips (I am currently reaping the benefits of leftover s’mores chocolate).
Jamie wanted to ride, too.
I love camping, but there were mishaps and miscommunications. A raspberry cobbler that I made on Friday, it’s mouth-watering scent perfuming my house for the afternoon, was ruined in the cooler. Breaking camp was harder than I could have imagined with that giant tent and having to lift everything to the pod on top of my car:
Will you just look at that thing? It’s absurd!
and then I had to unpack everything at home alone. Jamie is testing his “Terrible Two” muscle with frequent tantrums over not getting his way, and Charles… well, Charles went the whole weekend without a potty accident, only to backslide on Sunday afternoon. An episode that ended with him dropping a toothpick flag on the disgusting, wet floor of the lakeside State Park bathroom and then freaking out because I wouldn’t let him keep it. He kicked and screamed and when I threw him over my shoulder to haul him back to the car, he bit me. Both kids slept through the awful traffic until almost Everett, at which point they were hungry for dinner and I knew they would not get to sleep at a decent hour that night. Indeed, I plonked them both in their beds after fighting their tantrums about teeth and pajamas and books and sleep until 9 pm and took a shower.
Everything is terrible! He’s crying because he wants a third fruit snack pouch and I said no.
Good thing he’s cute.
Tony arrived home shortly thereafter and had his only interaction with the kids since Friday (and he was gone when they woke this morning) and I am sorry to say that it was negative, involving getting both of the kids back in bed, or, in Charles’s case, to sleep on the floor because in an act of defiance, he had ripped all of the bedding off of his bed. That kid knows how to party.
Charles learned how to light matches for the fire and cookstove. God help me.
I was clean. There was laundry in the washer and dryer. I poured myself a glass of wine and grabbed a couple of forks to share some of the leftover family reunion chocolate cake with Tony. But the night was not over, no. I thought I had better get all the cold packs from the cooler back in the freezer (what good are they if they’re not cold, right?) and that’s when I discovered that the big, upright freezer in our garage had failed over the weekend. We lost almost everything. We spent the rest of the night cleaning it out. I poured my glass of wine down the drain and slept like the dead.
I almost want to go camping again right away just to prove to myself that it can be better.
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