Sunday, June 28, 2009

Camping and then some...

It's not that there hasn't been enough interesting stuff going on in our lives to produce the inspiration for a post; there just has been almost too much going on. It's hard to be motivated to write anything family related, random, humorous or otherwise when one is falling asleep on the couch at 9pm. Certainly no writing gets done in the mornings because two very noisy and active boys are up at 6, and that's about the only time my brain seems to be functioning.


Ok...enough with the excuses. On with the silly family story!

It was a fine 96 degree day here in Alabama. I got on the bicycle with some of my teammates and rode just shy of 60 miles, and when I got back to the house...and napped...the idea of camping in the back yard came into play. We looked at the Internet to see if we were going to actually melt if we decided to sleep outside, and lo and behold, the temperature was going to drop to 88 (31 C) around bedtime, so SURE!

It's strange how living in the south distorts one's perceptions of what is a comfortable sleeping temperature...

Bryce and I set the tent up in record time in order to finish ahead of the routine evening swarm of mosquitoes. For Father's Day, I received a fantastic 8 person tent that actually sleeps my entire family. Once it was completely assembled and anchored down, the kids promptly went back in the house, literally filled a suitcase with stuffed animals and made a zoo in the tent. Part of this menagerie, naturally, were the mosquitoes that they let into the tent by going in and out of it for the next 2 hours. Telling them that they should leave the tent flap closed was completely lost on them.

Or the mosquitoes had extracted enough blood from them to make them loopy and oblivious to my sage advice...

Aiden loved the tent...


Now, I don't camp much, but back in my younger days, I would have thought that even using a sleeping pad was not "roughing" it enough, but now I wasn't about to sleep with 5 people in one tent without certain amenities. I hooked up two high speed fans in the tent and put two inflatable queen sized mattresses in it. Yeah...that's more like it.


At the end of the night came a fun display of lightning bugs, of which the kids caught quite a few, and then I pulled out the surprises... Glow sticks, or chem-lights, or whatever you call them. The frenetic swirling and twirling ensued and produced a scene that I haven't witnessed since clubbing in my younger days. The music was thumping through the outdoor speakers and the kids danced in the back yard. I think that I need to reiterate that we were actually camping. I wouldn't want you to get confused by the fact that we actually now seemed to have the entire house in the back yard.

Hey, it's just like being inside...only hotter and with more bugs! Wheee!

These are some 20-30 second exposures of the backyard "club scene".


Well, after being awoken at 4, 4:15, 4:30, 4:45, etc...I got up at 5 and went inside. Hence me having a moment to write up this post. I hope you enjoyed the foolishness and potentially take it as a warning if you value sleep! Now I have to go ride a bike, take the tent down and get ready for our afternoon entertaining 6 kids. 3 of which belong to some of our best friends who happen to be in Vegas without the children...obviously.

To say I envy them is an understatement of some unfathomable order of magnitude.