Camping

Last weekend we went camping with the kids. As with many activities involving young children, if the kids have fun then the adults have a markedly better chance to have fun as well. Let's face it - if the kids aren't having a good time, nobody is. Luckily C&C had a great time and as a result we did too. I am now really looking forward to our "big" family camping trip in early September.

The weekend was not, however, without it's share of sorrow. Things did not start out particularly well on Friday night.

We got to the campground around 6:30 and the sun was starting to sink into the trees. After circumnavigating the campground three times to assess the merits of various sites we managed to pick one and started getting set up. The breeze was starting to blow, and Katy and I were both surprised at how cool it was getting. I started laying a fire so we could keep warm, and Katy got going on dinner - spaghetti and a salad, an old camp standby, and always good on a cool evening.

I was just finishing up getting the last of our things put in our huge tent (Huge, I tell you! Big enough for two, yes two queen size air mattresses, with four feet of space between them. Needs a lot of flat land though.) and Katy had finished boiling the pasta. She was getting ready to drain it and was looking around for a likely tree to anoint with hot starchy water.

(As an aside, have you ever seen somebody draining pasta over a sink, using the lid to the pot they cooked it in to hold the pasta in while the water drains off? If so, have you ever watched helplessly as, across the space of one eyeblink, the pot lid slips aside ever so slightly and the newly-unguarded pasta shoots down the drain, disappearing like some kind of offering to the garbage disposal?)

Let's just say it's somehow more dramatic to watch something like that happen into the ground instead of a sink. Poor Katy - the lid slipped, and all of our main course ended up in the dirt - powdered with dust and bark. She had decided to only bring enough for the one meal as she figured (rightly so, in my mind) that the remaining half-bag of spaghetti wouId have gotten wasted anyway. I don't think she knew whether to laugh or cry. I managed to not laugh myself - at least for a minute or two.

Anyway, we didn't starve - there was plenty of peanut butter and homemade strawberry jam. And the weekend improved immeasurably from there.