How the Campout Went

It was actually quite successful. Perhaps acknowledging that up front takes away all the drama from the blog, but I didn't really have anything to complain about.

About 7:00 I went outside and had a fire with James and Grandma Davis, who is visiting for the week. We made s'mores, James dripped his all over his chair and pants, and then we started bringing out all the necessary provisions. I attempted to set up the tent, which went reasonably well. Safety is always a big concern among the Outdoor Goods community, so the manufacturers of our tent were kind enough to make it virtually assembly-proof, which keeps us very safe from being harmed while inside it. On a related note, Calvus pointed out to me that I should never have any trouble remembering the Hebrew word for tent. ('Ohel.)

We did get the tent set up and tarped, and then Grandma Davis pointed out when I returned from taking care of something indoors that it had nearly flown away several times in the wind. I improvised some tent stakes from sticks in the firebox, then brought out the final load of supplies for a night of roughing it outdoors: one child sized sleeping bag, one child-sized pillow, one Curious George book, one illustrated Bible story, Five Little Monkeys Wash the Car, a lantern, two adult sized blankets, a water bottle, a tumbler of scotch on the rocks, the Greek New Testament, Ovid's Metamorphoses, H.W. Joseph's Introduction to Logic, the Oxford Book of Latin Verse, Dickens' Master Humphrey's Clock, the Cambridge Companion to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, headphones, an iPhone 6, Hebrew vocabulary flashcards, three pens, two pencils, a yellow highlighter, and two blank notebooks. And George and Steven. You know, only the necessities.

If you couldn't tell, I was really hoping to get some reading done.

It didn't exactly work out. James and I had a lovely time reading his books aloud while he waited for it to get dark enough outside to justify turning the lantern on. At one point J arrived back home and came out to say goodnight, and when I saw that it was nearly 9:00 I told him that it was time to say prayers and go to bed.

"Are you going to bed too, Daddy?"
"I think I'm going to stay up and read some of my books for a bit."
"I want you to go to bed too."
"Tell you what, do you want to stay up a little longer and look at the pictures in your books while I read my books?"
"Can I turn the lantern on?"
"Yes, that's fine."

"Daddy, can you tell me what the words say?"
"James, you have that book memorized. You know exactly what the words say."
"Can you tell them to me?"

"Daddy, I wanna go to sleep."
"Okay, do you want me to turn the lantern off?"
"No, I wanna keep the lantern on."
"Okay, sleep well little bear."
"I want you to sleep too."
<moment of resigning ambitions of staying up late reading by lamplight>
"Okay, I'll go to sleep too. Do you want me to sleep next to you?"
"Yeah."

"Okay, night night James. Do you have enough room?"
"No."
"How about now?"
"I need you to move a little bit more further."
"How about this?"
"I need you to move a little bit more further."
"James, I'm all the way on the other side of the tent now."
"I want to sleep next to my books. Can you put them on my pillow?"
"Okay. But I'm going to turn out the lantern now."
"I still need to hold it."

We both woke up briefly after midnight when it sprinkled on the roof of the tent for a few minutes, and I went in to use the bathroom around 3 AM. He didn't stir when I opened or closed the tent, and I didn't hear anything else from him until 5:30 AM when it began to get light out and he woke up. That was the coldest it had been all night, but he wanted to read each of his books one more time before we went inside.

He was too scared of Grandma Davis sleeping on the couch downstairs to admit he needed to use the bathroom, so it wasn't until he had already eaten a donut and I was halfway through frying up some bacon that he told me he needed to go pee-pee RIGHT NOW. I ran him upstairs as quietly as possible, sat him on the potty, then snuck back down to take the bacon off the burner. It didn't get too badly burned. I made a delicious breakfast between the meat, some fried eggs, and some sliced mushrooms that I sauteed in the bacon drippings with freshly squeezed lemon juice. He turned his nose up at all of it and generally behaved like a child who'd lost three and a half hours off of his normal sleep schedule.

He just went down for a nap after doing reasonably well for the rest of the morning. He wants to know when we can go out and sleep in the tent again.