Musings of a technophile

My father-in-law had an old tent that he wasn’t planning on using anymore, so he gave it to us. It’s a three man dome tent, with a nice big window on the back.

Anyways, I had set the tent up to make sure all the pieces were there, and they boys really seems excited. I know there is this episode of Ni Hao Ki-lan (a Nick Jr. cartoon show about this little Chinese girl) where she goes camping, so perhaps that’s how they knew what it was for. Ethan started immediately asking to sleep in the tent, so I told him next Friday we would.

Well the week came and went. By Thursday I had forgotten about the “camping trip”, but apparently not Ethan. He asked if I could stay home, to which Mariel replied that the next day was Friday and I would be staying home for the weekend after work. Ethan immediately sparked up “Tomorrow is Friday!?!? Daddy and me are going camping!”

So, sure enough Friday night we put the tent back up when I got home and started setting up beds in there. Mariel had gone to the store and gotten each of the boys these little lanterns, so they could see in the dark (although there was a full moon and a clear sky – so it was PLENTY light out heh).

Even Logan was showing signs of wanting to camp. He went and climbed into the “bed” Ethan made and said “Nigh Nigh!” and then laid his head down and started making snoring noises We tried to get him to lay down in his own sleeping bag, back after a couple minutes he got over it and just wanted to go to sleep in his own bed.

At 7:55 the space shuttle took off – the last night launch of the current space shuttle models (barring any changes in the schedule of NASA). We were already outside so we looked up and saw it, was really cool to watch – you could see the booster modules fall off and start falling and everything. It really is an amazing sight.

After that, we decided to go to sleep. Logan and Mariel went inside, and Ethan and I laid down and turned our lanterns off. Ethan was really excited about it all. We called my dad back (he had called me earlier and I had brought my cell phone in the tent) and had Ethan talked to him about how excited he was.

I’m not sure whether it was because he was so excited, or whether it was just because he wanted to play, but it took until about 10PM for Ethan to finally go to sleep. It could have also been all the ambient noise going on from cars going by, planes flying overhead, crickets chirping – we were sleeping in the backyard after all.

Luckily Ethan went to sleep when he did cause it started raining pretty hard at about 10:15. Good thing I put that rain cover on just in case!

In the morning Ethan woke up, and we went inside in watched cartoons. He seems real happy to tell Mariel about how great his camping trip had been though.

All in all, we both had fun. It was the first time I had gone camping in like 9 years. I regret now that I did not take any pictures, but I suppose we’ll be doing much more camping in the future, so I’ll just have to live with the fact knowing I can take more later. I do look forward to the day when Logan can camp out with us as well; Ethan apparently loved it. I’m sure Ethan would pick up his pillow and start heading outside for another camping adventure at this point

Perhaps soon we will try and camp out over at Disney’s Fort Wilderness – that was always cool when my family did it when I was a child.