Camping: A Rehearsal.

My friend Mary has two delightful little girls who are around the same ages as Bean and Toot. And at the end of the spring, we concocted an ambitious plan to take our older daughters camping. For one night. I mean, that's as ambitious as we got.

Mary and her husband are veteran campers, and Todd and I drove across the country ten summers ago and pitched tents in various national and state parks, including the Grand Canyon (highlight: marriage proposal), Sequoia (highlight: perfectly rational, panicked night fueled by numerous and inescapable bear warnings), and Bryce and Zion (highlight: probably my all-time favorite, amazing, amazing hikes).

And then we had children.

To prepare for Marley's First Camp-Out, I staged a campground in our backyard. First, I went into the basement and dug out some old camping equipment, and then I realized that we couldn't find the poles for our tent, and we borrowed a bigger one from our trusty pal Abe. And then, Mary realized that her husband would be away working the weekend we had booked an actual campsite in Harold Parker State Forest, and she decided to bring her youngest daughter along. And then I figured, if we're bringing one two-year-old along, we might as well bring two. And so, Toot was suddenly in on it.

A few nights before the real thing, I put Abe's tent up in the backyard, got the fire pit going, and invited Will and his brothers over for marshmallow toasting and s'mores construction. By the end, we were sweaty and sticky, but still enthusiastic and therefore, successful.

Several times throughout the early evening, Rudy made her way into the tent and lay down with Lambie and a little proud smirk. But as soon as it got dark, Todd brought her inside and tucked her into her bed. I just didn't think having Toot along for the run-through would be productive. Before Todd went to bed himself, he came back into the tent for some lantern-lit Crazy Eights with Bean, which was, predictably, her favorite part of the entire experience. And after we read through the next chapter of our current Ramona book, Marley fell fast asleep and I realized how loud my quiet neighborhood is at night. I mean, lots of it's-summer-time-celebratory-yelling-and-screaming, and cars and trucks and dogs. And then mere feet away, I heard the wailing and warbling of some kind of creature. I froze just as quickly as I did when I heard a single leaf crunch in Sequoia National Park and was sure that a bear was just outside the tent ready to swipe my arm off because he smelled the beeswax in my chapstick.

Marley fell asleep as soon as I put Ramona the Pest down, and she slept all through the night and woke up only as I was returning from boot camp. And when I did some online research and actually, truly felt like Sid the Science Kid's mom, I learned that I had most likely heard a female Eastern Screech Owl. And that Marley would be an excellent camper, as long as she could maintain her fancy ways in her most flowing and elegant nightie.