Camping

To be perfectly honest, I was a little terrified of today. Smunch's behavior was so abominable yesterday that I wasn't even sure I'd be able to get out of bed this morning. It was one of those days where I just had to think, "What is wrong with this kid??" And I did...many times.

I should have paid my babysitter extra yesterday, but then, Smunch did have speech therapy, so we were gone and gave her a sweet hour and a half with an angelic little Mam. Even though the babysitter was here for 5 hours, I spent at least an hour and a half downstairs trying to placate Smunch into some kind of behavior than resembled a human being. It didn't work. He was a demon right up 'til dinner time...and then he magically became a nice little boy again.

So, yesterday was rough and I had a babysitter for 5 hours.

Today, on a whim, I decided to excavate my old tent from the storage shed. I say "old" tent, but in truth, this tent has only been used twice...both times for one-night car camping trips long before there were children in the picture. It's a very nice tent and it's in great shape.

The kids were thrilled. I decided to take them camping...in the backyard. After we all hung out in the tent for a little while this morning, we left it up, had lunch and went off to swimming class. Both kids were awesome the whole time, so we stopped for frozen yogurt while getting a prescription refilled and went to Safeway for camping supplies.

It turns out that camping supplies consist of hotdogs, graham crackers, Hershey bars and marshmallows.

Somewhere between Safeway and Curious George, there was a lot of bad behavior, including sand throwing, Lego structure-destroying and some shrill screaming. The tent came down and got packed away. The level of screaming and crying increased exponentially. In the end, I promised if they could help each other right the damages to the other's property, I'd reinstate their camping privileges.

Yeah. The kids still watched Curious George at 4:30, but at 6 o'clock the campfire (aka, barbeque) was roaring and Daddy showed the kids how to cook their own hot dogs. We moved from the campfire to the...uh...patio table. There was a good deal of screaming and crying after Mam was reassured that yes, indeed, she did have to eat all her carrots before she'd be allowed to roast marshmallows, but Smunch was so anxious to get on with the s'mores that he stood there and fed her most of the carrots.

The tent went back up.

We had our s'mores, the kids had their bath. They couldn't wait to jump in the tent and go to sleep.




But, of course, what they did was jump in the tent, get in their sleeping bags and wiggle...and giggle...and wiggle some more. "Mam woke me up!" "This is a nice tent!" "Why is it blue?" "What is that light?" "What was that sound?" And at 9:45pm, our camping trip was over. Both kids were moved, of their own accord, to their beds and I was free at last!