Camping week

We have a tent up in the backyard, largely just for fun, but also because we will be going on an MDC campout this weekend with a vatload of our homies. We thought it would be nice to let the kids adjust to it and see how they liked sleeping outside.

Monday night, I spent the night in the tent with G&N. We read books by lamplight and pretended we were back at the Renny Faire where the knights could protect us and we could smell the faire food. I was impressed by how swiftly the children went to sleep, and how they slept all night. Their mother, however, was more like the princess and the pea large pile of rocks.

Not the loamy, soft earth of my home, my backyard. It was like sleeping on a bumpy board, and the benefit to this experience was that I now know when we go camping for real I will have to have extra blankets support our sleeping bags. P-daddy(who had a where-is-Mommy? snuggler) and I didn't sleep well that night, and when 5AM Boobie Call came around, I was happy to answer. For the record, I heard D in the tent, in the backyard, through the closed window. So rest assured, when we say he is loud, we do not exagerrate.

Anyway, the big kids had a great time, slept through the night and were so happy with the experience that they went back in last night. Their parents, however, declined to join them. With the kids ensconced asleep in their tent, the baby tucked away in bed, P-daddy and I got down to business in the most appropriate ways parents do when they find themselves alone: we scrubbed an entire load of work clothes that had been spackled by an inkpen hidden into a shirt pocket. Despite arising at 5, I stayed up until 12.30 AM. I had just lain down my head when I heard N wailing from the backyard, through the open bedroom window.

I wandered out there to hear G groggilly soothing him back to sleep. After speaking with an incoherent, sleep-talking daughter for a moment, I went back to bed. At 3AM, P-daddy did the tent rounds, eventually bringing both children inside, while D never really recovered from the movement of the P-Daddy even after he returned to bed. (How will we ever get him out of our bed if he requires bookends to sleep?) So here we are, dawning on day two into the experiment. The parents are even more tired than they were yesterday, and the children are snoozing away quite happily, sleeping late in their own beds.

I am pretty happy with NO ONE sleeping in the tent tonight.