But riding bikes, albeit a wonderful activity, doesn’t compare to hanging out with friends and the kids. The highlight activity of the weekend was most certainly getting a pair of Bryce and Ansley’s friends over to camp out!
Paul and I set up the Taj Mahal of tents in the back yard. Seriously, that tent was great. Thanks Paul! It was erected on something of a slope, but at least none of us slid out into the grass while sleeping!
After a huge meal of hotdogs, burgers and bratwurst (mmmmm….tasty), we had the campfire in the fire pit and made s’mores. Of course, the younger campers didn’t seem to have the patience for s’mores. They would quickly set their marshmallows ablaze, and once the flames were extinguished, shove them in their mouths. The rest of the s’mores ingredients were then requested with a “Cun uh huff sum choklut” in a very mouth-full- of-warm-sticky-marshmallowy-goodness kind of way…
The kids ventured out and caught several fireflies and wanted to hang the cage in the tent to act as a nightlight or perhaps a bioluminescent disco ball. We convinced them that it wasn’t the best idea, and once they were in bed, all the fireflies “escaped” back into the wild. Yes…that is exactly how it happened, and I’m sticking to that story!
We sat around the campfire for story time and our funny stories ended up “degrading” into silliness, or based on your opinion of kid bathroom humor, being “elevated” to the highest form of verbal eloquence possible. The kids basically took over the story telling and each story ended with some variant of “and he said BooYaa, pulled off his/her shirt…and then a flying monkey landed on his/her face and peed on him/her”…ahem.
I do realize that as inappropriate bathroom humor may be, you could be reading the phonebook and as long as you ended your reading with something involving bodily functions, you would get laughs. Not from me of course. I’m far to high-brow for such coarse humor…pee-poop-toot...giggle…
Naturally, after enough sugar to give a horse cardiac palpitations, they went to bed quite easily!
Riiiiiight… You can see from the photo that the flashlights were shining and spinning all around the tent's interior, but the photograph's long exposure time made really neat lines when the flashlights moved. Needless to say, Paul and I were concerned that the tent may not survive all the wiggling and giggling going on inside.
When Paul and I finally climbed into the tent, the kids were all fast asleep, but not in the normal fashion. They were literally piled on top of each other like so many puppies. We had to extract our respective children from the tangled mess of arms, legs, and sleeping bags and then try to get some sleep. Ah, the joy of sleeping out doors with 4 kids and two adults in a tent. Never mind that our kids sleep like small windmills ever spinning.
After getting a foot, elbow, hair, and another foot in my face repeatedly, I thought that we should try to hook up some sort of generator to them at night to harness the un-ending motion. Think of the pseudo-clean energy source that has been under our noses since parenting began! Forget trying to save the world with nuclear energy or getting hydrogen from water! Kid Power!
In the end, the camping event was a huge success, but I think I am going to hold off doing it again until fall!
1 comment:
What memories you made last weekend--Fathers' Day 2008. I fondly remember camping with you and Patty, Brad, and your mother. Our camping usuall involved a state park and a lake or a fine sandbar along the Ouchita River. We laughed and giggled, just as you did with yours. You caught fireflys and we caught a little fish from time to time. What great and glorius times those were.
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