Camping With The Tiny Terrorists

A couple of weekends ago I took the little people on their FIRST camping trip! I had coordinated this venture with The Wife and Captain John and there would be tubeing down the river as well as CAMPING.

For weeks leading up to the actual event, the offspring were giddy with excitement at the thought of CAMPING and tubeing. I used this as leverage to force my progeny into submission, the mere threat of missing the trip was often enough to quiet even the most persistent whining. Life was good.

The day to leave arrived and the swan into the car and drove over to Captain John’s house. The Tiny Terrorists were quite helpful in getting out stuff loaded into the RV. After the loading and all we picked up The Wife from work and we were OFF! The fun part happened then. The progeny started the “Are we there YET?” about an hour into the drive. Joy.

Eventually we arrived at the camping area and were utterly astonished by the sheer number of GRASSHOPPERS. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if the river had turned to blood what with the plague of locusts! I’m not fond of grasshoppers and my tiniest of offspring is afraid of well… All bugs! So this was FUN! I mean fun if you consider dealing with a shrieking child fun. THEN we got to put the tent up, which the offspring were rather excited about for some damn reason, I didn’t care, it made the shrieking stop! The tent went up with out incident then we all donned swim suits and headed to the river to play in the water.

The water was fine except really low. There was one deep area which we did drag the Tiny Terrorist to and this was fine with Super Girl, Cabbage Patch on the other had insisted she was going to drown unless she was firmly attached to an adult much like a scared cat clinging to a tree branch for dear life. No one drown but Super Girl did learn to sort of swim with her face in the water which very much did look like she was going to drown. When this got really tiresome, we went back to the camp site and met up with the rest of our camping group who had just arrived.

Wynde Darling and MacGyver Ho had arrived and were setting up camp. I took this opportunity to cause further mental trauma to my offspring by taking them to shower in the bath house! Woohoo! Their first public shower! But FIRST we had to GET to the bath house. We had to walk across a field area and as we walked the grasshoppers would scatter which caused much squealing and “Mommy I need you!”s from Cabbage Patch. It must have taken 10 minutes to get to the bath house and it was only a 2 minute walk! Arriving was just frightening for the progeny as there were BUGS in the building and BUGS in the shower area. Both of them balked at getting into the shower that afforded us very little privacy other than a badly hung shower curtain but me being the good mother that I am I told the suck it up and get in the damn shower. Quite honestly it was creepy and really gross and the big ass spider that was hanging out under the sink was giving me a nervous tick, but we needed showers and I had already hauled our stuff to the bath house so it was going to happen.

After the shower the Tiny Terrorists practically ran out of the bath house. We had dinner and eventually everyone settled down to sleep. 1 queen sized inflatable mattress + 2 squirmy kids + me = very little sleep for me. In the middle of the night I woke as the kids were awake and complaining. I asked if they needed to go to the bathroom and both declined my offer (I honestly think at that moment Cabbage Patch would have opted for her bladder to explode rather than go back in the bathroom) so I grabbed my flashlight and headed out solo. When I had nearly reached the bath house I started to feel big fat rain drops. ‘Oh SHIT! The tent windows are unzipped!’ I thought as I dashed into the scary bathroom and took the fastest piss of my life then ran back to the tent in the dark (which in retrospect probably was not the brightest idea, but I didn’t trip over any thing so whatever). Luckily my offspring are fairly smart and had started zipping windows up in a panic as it was raining pretty hard by then. We finished zipping and settled into bed where in Super Girl looks at me and says “Camping SUCKS!” to which I sweetly answered her “Well too bad, we have another night of this so you better start likeing it!”. 10 minutes later Super Girl informs me that SHE HAS to go PEE. *sigh* out into the rain we go. Finally we are settled into bed and it’s time to sleep. It’s nice and cool in the tent from the rain and we sleep. For a couple of hours at least. Then I wake to drips of water. I turn on the flashlight and see that on both ends of the tent water has accumulated in big watery utters in the places that we didn’t tie down the rain cover. Fucking great. Not only that but right above the bed is another spot that is dripping… on... ME! I rouse my offspring and tell them we need to move the bed out of the way of the dripping. This is when I discover there are a few more drippy spots so I just try to position the bed in the least wet area, then it’s back to bed. The rain kept up until about 7 am.

The tubeing was fine, but short due to the river being really low. We all hit the river for the short trip (2 hours) and there was plenty of whining from the Tiny Terrorist. When we got to the drop off point the plan was for us to take all the tubes to the drop off point and go down the river again. I took that moment to talk to my youngest to see if she wanted to tube the river again because she was the one doing MOST of the whining the first time down. She said she wanted to stay and play on the beach so we did. Unbelievably my friends had a laps of sanity and offered to take Super Girl with them. I asked if they were serious… or drunk... and they assured me they WERE serious (and only slightly drunk) so I threatened Super Girl’s life if she misbehaved and let her go.

Cabbage Patch and I played then showered then waited for people and she wet her pants twice (that kid hated the bath house!). Everyone finally arrived back and camp. I washed the remaining child and then headed back to camp to wait for everyone to get showered. Poor exhausted Cabbage Patch curled up in a camp chair and fell asleep.

After dinner at a local Mexican place we headed back to camp and off to bed. In the tent the kids were complaining about each other touching them so I told Cabbage Patch she could sleep at the bottom of the bed which was closer to the fan. She grabbed her pillow and blanket and went to the bottom of the bed. Everyone slept. I woke in the middle of the night and turned on my flashlight to check the kids (it’s a mom thing). One in bed next to me, hogging the bed and one… wait.. where is the one that was at the bottom of the bed?!?!?!?!?! I sit up and look over the edge of the bed. She had fallen off the bed and was sound asleep on the floor. I just tossed a blanket on her and went back to sleep.

And the next day we headed home. I’ll thrill you later with the story of the fabulous sun burns! I think I’ve bored you enough for now.