Camping 2.0
Recently, my girls and I went on another camping adventure, with Carly, Paige, and Mary. This time, though, the dads came along, too. Todd and Mike were there for the ride, which meant that Mary and I had a good twenty minutes alone while she heated up the chicken soup and chili she had made in advance, and I cheered her on with a raised plastic cup of red wine, my only real contribution. Then the twenty minutes were up when the dads brought the girls back from a field trip to the water, and it was family camping through the rest of cold night and into the morning. I was proud of myself, mostly for simply handling an unseasonably chilly night in the north. You know, when the temperatures were in the forties. Here's how I managed: I wore my lined running pants under my jeans, and at least four layers on top, and at night, I hugged Rudy in my sleeping bag like she was my heating pad. I was keeping her warm, of course, but she was a happy little bundle of toasty, too.
Marley, it turns out, does not like to wear layers. "Everybody's different, Momma!" she cried passionately, when I tried to get her to wear tights under her pajama pants. She was doing that thing in which your children take a well-intentioned lesson you've tried to teach them and totally twist its meaning to their advantage.
One highlight, for me, was the insane assortment of odds and ends that Rudy packed in her own Camping Backpack, the most unnecessary and outrageous being the pink and silver pinwheel tucked in an outer pocket. She insisted on carrying that backpack with her from tent to campfire to beach to nearby walking trails to tent again, which means that I often ended up carrying it as well.
The place where we camped was absolutely beautiful. Our site was almost on the water, near a footbridge leading to a small island where we hung out for a good fifteen minutes before Marley couldn't take her full bladder for one moment longer. The same island I went back to, searching for a missing plastic shoe that Rudy's "Cinderella Baby" had lost. I tried convincing her that a lost slipper only made her Cinderella more authentic, but I also felt I wouldn't be a good mother without at least trying to find it. So I went back and met up with some hardy Northern New Englanders, easily identifiable by their Laconia-like t-shirts and the full-on Billy Ray Cyrus mullets. One teased me a little for already wearing a sweatshirt, saying something like, "Isn't it a little early for that?" "Not for me," I muttered sheepishly, and then when I got to the campsite I realized that if I were a different kind of person, I would've asked him if it were too late to be rocking that hairdo.
Marley, it turns out, does not like to wear layers. "Everybody's different, Momma!" she cried passionately, when I tried to get her to wear tights under her pajama pants. She was doing that thing in which your children take a well-intentioned lesson you've tried to teach them and totally twist its meaning to their advantage.
She stayed in her shorts for most of the afternoon, and didn't even want to wear her hat when we sat by the fire that night and early the next morning, when oatmeal, hot chocolate, and blueberry muffins were brought out to much excitement.
It was, in all, a successful trip. Next time (Mary), I vow to help more with the cooking and to remember to bring camp chairs so that I don't have to perch on a cooler by the fire. And maybe, in a year or two, our little girls will be capable of an extended hike, one in which they carry their own crazed belongings the entire time. Probably not.
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