Adventures In The Great Outdoors

So Chad and I checked a major thing off our wish list this weekend which was to take Olivia on her first camping trip. I'll have photos up tomorrow when I sift through the stuff and bugs to locate the camera. I will admit to being a little nervous that this was going to be a total freaking disaster, but it ended up only being train wreck with some redeeming moments of family bonding. i will sum it up in three telling highlights

1) Olivia took the opportunity to experience nature au naturale by refusing to wear clothes whenever we were in our campsite.

2) I was feeling a little insecure about our seeming lack of camping equipment until we made a kickass meal with nothing but foil and a cast iron skillet.

3) After mercilessly mocking my husband for his desire to sleep on an air mattress, going so far as to refer to him as princess for most of the weekend, I had a much more embarrassing bourgeois moment. So what comes after massive flooding is, of course, massive mosquitoes so after my third application of bug spray, suntan lotion, and cooking smores with a four year-old my hands were sticky, disgusting, and somehow still covered in bug bites. So, naturally I freaked out. I marched to the car, dug out my bottle of Origins hand soap that my mother had just given to me as part of a very pricey birthday gift and totally washed my hands from a water pump, squatting in the mud with thirty dollar soap. You know what? I felt much better.

It wasn't my best camping trip ever mostly because we wanted to be close to stuff for Olivia's sake and that means being close to people. And you all know how i feel about people. It was a big confidence booster and next year we will be ready for a nice hike in site where there will be no people, or air mattresses.