Camping

I love camping.  I don't know why I love it.  But I love it.  Well, I guess I know why I love it.  But I didn't know that I loved it so much that it was worth a sleepless night of endless nursing and waking up to a little girl who wet her sleeping bag at five in the morning (I got out of the clean-up on that one because the endlessly nursing baby was nursing at the time). 

A couple of nights ago we went camping for the first time since the day before I had the baby.  Remember that camping trip?  It was to our backyard where we tried for an hour to get our three four-and-unders to lay down in their sleeping bags.  Then, once they finally nodded off, a high wind made us wake them back up and take down the tent before it got blown to the top of some neighbor's roof.  That was pretty awesome.  But this camping trip was to an actual, real-life, no-holds-barred camp ground.  It came complete with a forest, a picnic table, and endless RV neighbors.  We set up our tent in a bed of leaves underneath a ring of trees.  Minus the five million spiders that thought the leaves made a pretty good bed as well, it really was a primo spot.

Once our campsite was set up I settled in and I watched.  I'm pretty sure it was the watching that made the pee-peeing-bag worth it.  I watched my oldest hold a thin branch full of dead leaves over the fire.  It flamed right up.  He tried to pull it back out and was surprised when his Dad and I freaked out.  Oh the fascination of fire.  Even after we got after him for it he tried to casually sneak in a few more sticks.  I watched my little girl bend down a sappling tree and try to ride it like a horse.  It bucked her right off into the leaves.  I watched my hefty, blond two-year old hop on and off the cement pad to the leaves, the cement pad to the leaves, the cement pad to the leaves... 

I wanted to laminate it, I wanted to bottle it, I wanted to save it to an external hard drive.  It was youth and nature and purity and happiness and memory all joyful in front of me.  That kind of thing is addicting.  A person could go through any number of tortures to see their children getting muddy throwing rocks into a lake and looking for deer eyes with their flashlights in the night woods.