I am starting to really feel the pinch of the single father schedule. So I plan to go cheap on this blog post. We had the fathers and sons camp out last week up in Sharon, Vermont. There is a campground attached to the Joseph Smith birthplace that is very nice, lots of grass, though many hills. Now with no mama home, I was wondering what I should do with the girls (locking them in the closet with the iPad and a bag of cereal did cross my mind). Fortunately some friends in the ward (thanks Jones family) offered to let the girls have a sleepover with their daughter. So it ended up being just me and the boys.
We got our six person tent all set up and even got up the rain. I am amazed at how much easier the tent goes up when you have boys scouting age who can do something more than job in the middle of the tent has your trying to put it up. I was even able to put Ronin to work in bringing me the stakes for the tent, though rather than hand them to me he would chuck them at me from the other side of the tent. He also had his eye on the hatchet that I was using to pound the stakes and so I made sure I hid it, but only after he had smashed the cutting edge against a nice granite rock. So he stuck with his blankey instead.
We had a good time roasting hotdogs over the fire. I have noticed as the boys have gotten bigger, regular hotdogs won't do. So we had chicken apple sausages. Awfully good. I am also learning that I need to bring more soda. One of the kids that I teach in primary asked if he could have one root beer. I said yes. So he took all his buddies to the cooler and cleaned us out.
Three handsome boys by the fire. We also made s'mores which Ronin called sandwiches and did not seem to want the graham cracker, chocolate, and marshmallow together, but they were fine individually. It looked pretty good to me.
I took Ronin on a rickshaw ride on the wood hauling cart they provide for you. He loved it, but my not-so-buns-of-steel felt the burn.
They had a fireside in the evening which was thankfully short. Not that I don't like firesides, but with a bunch of kids hyped up on s'mores, it needs to be short. I tried to take a photo, but it makes us Mormons look like a bunch of witch burning pagans (she did weigh as much as a duck - what choice did we have? We could have all ended up as newts).
They even had ice cream treats after the fireside. The problem was they had been kept in a cooler with regular ice for an hour or two ahead of time, so it was essentially chilled milky mush with a stick.
Ronin, thankfully, went to sleep willingly. The one catch was that he started on the uphill side of the tent and would slide downward and through the wall that divided my side from the big boy's side of the tent (I like to keep the dividing wall down with the big boys as a smell barrier - if you catch my drift or more to the point, their drift). So every hour I would wake up, notice Ronin was missing, reach under the wall and pull the sleeping bag back to the high side of the tent (and take his picture with the flash - for waking me up).
I also learned that all of my boys talk in their sleep and all rather urgently. All that being said, the rain on the tent muted most of the talking, but did make for a wet clean up the next day.
All in all it was a great campground, no one went the hospital (unlike 2007), and we got to hang out with lots of friends. I'll chalk this one up as a win in the dad column.
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