camping...

camping was obviously invented by the same person who came up with menstrual cramps, warm beer, and emeril lagasse... 

what happened?...i thought camping was fun?...i mean, i have had fun camping...i know i have...but after this trip i cannot imagine ever going again...at least not with my immediate family... 

the boybarians were more boybarianish than usual, and much much louder than normal... 

the first day started out nicely until we were at the lake...wherein some old guy asked me

"is she your daughter (pointing to wingman) or are you her grandma"

um, WHAT!!!..."grandma"!?!?...

"um, he is my son, and i am his mother"

"oh the long hair...hell, i've got long hair i oughta know better"

no shit sherlock...you figured that out now could you enlighten me as to why in the sam hell you thought i might be somebody's grandma?!?...

so on the way back to the camp i fumed about it then unfortunately i figured out that in all reality, in some backwoods world, i could indeed at 33 be wingman's grandma...

if i had a baby at 15, and that baby had a baby at 15, then at my present age of 33 i could be the grandma to a three year old...

cheery...

the weekend went downhill from there...i won't go into boring and extreme detail, but i will give you some highlights...

three a.m...the lord of the ring, wingman, and i are all sleeping in one tent, the duke is sleeping smack dab next to us in a two-man backpacking tent...we are all asleep...then i hear

"papa"

i wait, pretending to be asleep and wondering if the lord of the ring will wake up...

"papa"

okay, so he probably has to pee or wants to sleep with us...neither of which i want to deal with, but will have to...

"papa's asleep, what do you need?"

"my butt is itchy"

hmm...didn't even consider that RANDOM AND TOTALLY ANNOYING POSSIBILTY!!!...

"mama, my butt is itchy and it's bothering me!"

so it's three a.m. and i am in the middle of the woods in a tent and now i have to deal with an itchy butt...great...so i ask the lord of the ring, who is now awake, where the wipes are since he was the last person to use them...he doesn't know...they aren't in the tent...

so now i have to get the flashlight and traipse around in the dark (i am afraid of the dark, by the way) looking for a little bag of wipes so i can aide in taking care of my son's itchy butt...i am not happy...i am muttering four letter words and doing a lot of stumbling...and i cannot for the life of me find those goddamned wipes!...then i hear

"nevermind, i'm over it"

to which i say

"no you are not!...you are not over it!...when i find the wipes and help you out, then you are over it!"

the wipes are located with a LOT of grumbling...and where were these wipes you may ask?...funnily enought, they were in the tent i just came from...

the situation is taken care of and we go back to sleep...until we hear crunching...not pine needles falling, not twigs snapping, not the wind...crunching...

a family of raccoons is enjoying a large bag of tortilla chips at our expense...which prompts a tired and half naked lord of the ring to go out into the night and scare them away...by making some weird noise and throwing rocks...like a scene right out of a movie...the chips are rescued and the lord of the ring returns... 

by now, the duke is in our tent, and i am somewhere in between two sleeping pads and two really fluffy pillows and two really sweaty boys who i know for a fact brushed their teeth before bed, but of which no evidence of that can be detected at four in the morning...

the next morning i am attempting to prepare coffee...if you have ever made coffee while camping that is not instant, then you know what a process it is...so i am fiddling with my makeshift coffee maker, while the lord of the ring is doing some fiddling of his own trying to get breakfast together...then we hear

"i have to poop!"

very loudly, and from the direction that suggests that the duke is smack dab between our two neighboring sites, who are also up and preparing breakfast...

we exchange that look that only parents can exchange...the one that does not say "well, we're in this together let's deal with it" but rather a look that says "why i found you atractive ten years ago which eventually led us here, i do not know...because now look what i have to deal with"...

"um, i said i have to poop!...c'mon!"

where's that number for the military school?...does my cell phone work up here?...

he gets taken care of and the day and trip go on...we were definitely like the loud family you see in target...the boys were too hemmed in by the proximity of the other sites and campers, making them louder by ten-fold...and we were too worn out and exasperated to care if we are saying trite and eye-rolling parental phrases in less than quiet voices...

it was not one of our more norman rockwellish outings...

i guess our mistake was in thinking we could enjoy ourselves and relax, which we are both in desperate need of...oh, and not bringing enough beer...

preparing for and executing a camping trip is a hell of a lot of work...even if you do have fun...but when you do all that work, and fun isn't being had, then it really sucks...and that was the case...the boybarians are just at that age (which i am rapidly coming to understand is not just a "phase"...but rather a series of "phases" that will continue to bombard us until they leave the house)...right now their whole purpose in life right now is to see how much they can bother the other one...and us...

and then you add in the man who thought i was somebody's grandma, another man who threw his lit cigarette into the lake of swimming children, hungry raccoons, itchy butts, and the dog pooping on the beach in front of everyone picnicking and swimming then one can surmise that we really had no chance in hell of smooth sailing...

even the drive home had it's irritations...we stopped to see the worlds largest spruce tree AND a big cedar tree...not THE WORLD'S LARGEST cedar tree, the sign just said "big cedar tree"...and still, we stopped...one time we had to stop, park, and HIKE in, the other we had to turn off the road and AWAY from our destination of home, stop, park, and hike in...each time i had this to say

"if these were really big trees we should be able to see them from the road" 

oh, and lunch on the way home?...i think we picked the all time dirtiest restaurant in the history of restaurants...i mean filthy...stuff was piled all over, the cook was grumpy, the woman running the place was old and overwhelmed and some little girl who belonged to them was just wandering around bugging the diners...it was like being in somebody's really really dirty house, only you had to pay them for the meal they were about to serve you...we were desperate, in the middle of nowhere, and so there we were...i said

"i'm just glad we aren't here right after my food poisoning" (from the spaghetti that tried to kill me a few weeks earlier) 

to which the lord of the ring said

"this place makes me want to go home and clean my house and fix my car"

indeed...

so that was the trip and now it's over...all i can say is thank god for t.v. and the computer...as soon as we got home we plugged one whiny, hot, irritated boybarian into one and one into the other....

and found the first bit of peace we had had all weekend...

it's funny, raising kids is always a crapshoot...because the last time we went camping we had so much fun we went again the next weekend...but for some reason, this time was awful and so full of work...camping may just not be our thing right now...BUT, because we are either brave or stupid we are going camping again in the fall...just to see if that time it will work...yeah, i'll let you know how that theory pans out...

in the meantime, if you need me i'll be right here...because the only place i am going for awhile is insane...but that's the same old trip i've always been on...the beauty is, on this trip there is a mr. coffee and nobody mistakes me for a grandma...

x.