Late Thursday night, I checked my e-mail and saw this e-mail to our daycare-parent group from Grayson's mom:
We hadn't planned on camping with the kids until next summer, but this scenario seemed ideal: It would only be one night, it was at a campground only 20 minutes away, we would arrive after nap on Saturday and leave before nap the next day. And, we'd be camping with Grayson's family, so we'd have more adults to supervise the kids, and built-in entertainment for Alice.
I quickly consulted with Zac, and he agreed: We should go for it! Back when we were dating (gasp--16 years ago) we'd often talked about taking our imaginary kids camping. So it was a bit overwhelming to realize that the moment had finally arrived, and quite unexpectedly.
I spent all of Friday morning at work, while my students were taking their final exam, e-mailing with Lindsey about details and making a camping packing list.
Friday afternoon I got groceries.
Friday night, we got all our camping gear out of the attic and made sure it hadn't been eaten by something or disintegrated in the heat. The nice thing about camping gear is that it's pretty durable, and all of it had survived seven years in our attic.
The last time we'd been camping was more than four years ago, when I was just barely pregnant with Alice, so we even set up our tent in the living room to make sure we'd all fit. Zac and I laid down, Alice kept jumping around trying to grab the ceiling, and Simon kept tugging on our shirts, saying, "Mommy, get up! Daddy, get up!" We thought it was probably accurate foreshadowing for what awaited us the next night.
Alice was beyond excited.
