Our Adventurous Camping Adventure

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a mom in recent years it’s that everything is adventurous when you do it with three kids- even something as simple as a quick stop at the grocery store. So, by all accounts, when you go on an adventure with three kids you are actually embarking on an adventurous adventure. That’s adventure multiplied by adventure. Which equals? An exponential amount of adventure….Heck, yeah, that’s a lot of adventure…. Challenge accepted!  I’m sure that when some people heard I was taking Josie, Jamie, and Johnny on their first camping trip, while 24+ weeks pregnant, they thought I was nuts. But clearly I’ve never been one to shy away from a good adventure…. Adventurous adventure, that is.

I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I would never attempt an adventure of this magnitude on my own. Rather, our weekend camping trip was well planned out and thoroughly coordinated in advance with my sister, Joanie, and her husband, Daniel. They found us a nice camping spot within a two hour drive at a little place called Thousand Trails that was well equipped with family- friendly amenities. Joanie and I spent all of last week swapping phone calls, making sure we weren’t forgetting anything. Joanie and Daniel made the reservation and provided the tent while I brought the food and fire wood, and so forth. After all, the secret to a successful adventure is preparation.

Feeling fully prepared and ready for whatever adventures awaited us, we arrived at our camp site on Saturday afternoon. The best part about camping with young kids is that, in their eyes, everything is exciting:

Stacking fire wood and building a fire,

sleeping in a tent (which Jamie lovingly referred to as “my hideout”),

The "hideout"

Afternoon tent nap

washing with a pump and bucket.

The boys spent a lot of time at this water pump

Most of our time was spent accomplishing these rudimentary activities. There was also a lot of sitting around,

Coloring with Aunt Joanie

 lounging,

Hanging out with Uncle Daniel

 and playing in the dirt going on.

Getting dirty!

 Probably the kids’ favorite activity of the weekend was our two trips to the campground’s swimming pool.

Maybe it’s the pregnant woman in me thinking with my stomach, or maybe its for the sake of nostalgia, by my favorite part of the weekend was roasting s’mores.

Enjoying a delicious s'more (and looking quite pregnant)

Ooey, gooey, goodness!

It all sounds like fun and games, but remember what I said about doing even the most simple things with kids? Yep. Adventurous, to say the least. Over the 48 hour period that constituted our camping endeavor we managed to amass quite an array of “incidents.” Each one has it's own story, but for sake of time I've been forced to summarize. There were three bloody noses and two vomit clean-ups, two minor burn injuries and three tick removals- the worse of which was a tick that had to be removed from Jamie’s scrotum- also two blisters and another two thorn removals, not to mention all the bug bites that were too many to count. To top it all off we had a camp chair catch on fire, I had to have my car battery jumped twice, and our tent almost collapsed on Josie in the middle of the night. Nobody ever said that adventures aren’t dangerous.  

But, needless to say, we all made it home from our adventure alive and well… except for the burnt camp chair, of course. We’re all scratching our bug bites like crazy and still recovering from two nights of sleeping on the hard ground, but I think in a couple days, after all the “boo boo”s are healed, we’ll look back at this adventurous adventure as a successful one. There’s no doubt that it was filled with picture perfect moments!

Good Days

Every once in a while I need a good park trip to remind me how much I love being a mom. All that fresh air and those wide open spaces bring out the best in my kids, which brings out the best in me. 

There’s nothing like a trip to the park after days and days of rain. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday last week brought us a lot of rain, which is rarely welcome in a house with three crazy kids. I started to lose it after the tenth episode of Curious George on Netflix, the fifth time being asked for a snack, and the third dump out of the super hero basket of toys. It’s always that same basket of toys!

At this point, when I’m bending over and piling Spiderman, Thor, and Captain America back into the basket AGAIN, my patience begins to run thin and, for the life of me, I can’t remember why on earth I ever thought I enjoyed motherhood. So I was praising the Lord when the rain let up on Thursday, just enough to make a trip to the park possible.

The boys were just as excited to get out as I was. (Josie had to go to school.) I could see it in their faces, plastered with ear to ear smiles and mile deep dimples.

Another advantage of going to the park after three days of rain is that all the bugs are out. Jamie and I discovered some clusters of bugs (worms? caterpillars? I don’t know. They’re all bugs to me) hiding in the nooks of a climbing rock wall. Jamie felt like he’d discovered buried treasure. He cuddled and coddled the bugs for the next hour, even taking a handful with him down the slide and trying to feed them a piece of his bologna sandwich when we took a break for lunch.

After we exhausted the play power of the swings, the slides, and the worms, we set off on a little nature walk. Much to my amazement, Jamie and Johnny actually did most of their own walking. Jamie led the way like a brave adventurer and even stopped me a few times, insisting he check to see if it was safe so that I wouldn’t get a “boo boo.” Johnny waddled happily behind his big brother, often stopping to admire the sand and sticks in his path. They seemed as if they could walk ‘til they reached the ocean.

We did eventually have to call it a day, but ironically we found ourselves back at the same park again on Saturday. It was nice that Josie was able to join us the second time around.

It is such a joy to be a mom to happy kids. Those smiles and dimples are the jewels in my earthly treasure chest. When we drove away from the park on Saturday and Josie said from the back seat, “We had fun at the park. That was a really fun day!” and Jamie shouted, “Yeah!” in agreement, I felt filled with love and blessings. My cup runneth over. I need good days at the park like these to cling to on those other days when being a mom feels less joyous and more mundane; on days when I am bending over, piling the super hero toys back into their basket for the fourth, fifth, sixth time. In fact, it’s raining right now and….yep, there it goes….I just heard Iron Man hit the floor. Thank God for good park days!

Room for Four

As most of you know, I grew up in a family of seven: my mom and my dad, my three sisters, my brother, and myself. That’s five kids! And we all shared a tiny two bedroom house. That’s right.  For most of our childhood, my four siblings and I all shared one bedroom. Granted, it was a large bedroom- large enough to fit one single bed and two sets of bunk beds. It may sound a bit cramped and crowded, and by the time we grew older it did start to feel that way, but none the less I LOVED IT! Some of my most treasured memories are of staying up past bedtime, concocting ridiculous midnight rendezvous in the closet, talking in silly voices in hopes of convincing my baby sister that we were her ‘conscious’ so that she would do our bidding, and planning all the crazy adventures we would have the next day. I wouldn’t trade those precious moments of sibling togetherness for all the personal space in the world.

So, to me, making room for a fourth child in our three bedroom home now is no problem.

No problem. But still a question in need of an answer. Where will our four children sleep?

Room arrangements have been constantly fluctuating around here for a few months. When we first moved into this house last June we decided to make the smallest bedroom into a girl’s room for Josie and the bigger bedroom into a boys’ room for Jamie and Johnny. It worked well enough. Josie appreciated the novelty of having her own room for the first time and I was able to decorate the boys’ room in the vintage football theme that I’d been dreaming about. But complications soon arose. Johnny is a rather loud sleeper (he reportedly spent one night moaning, “Mama, mama, mama, mama…” for two hours straight) and he was continually waking up his brother. Whenever I asked Jamie why he wouldn’t stay in his own bed he would put his hands over his ears and say, “Non non (John John) loud!”  Jamie inevitably ended up climbing into bed with either Josie or me at one point or another during the night, every night. We continued in this way all through the fall and winter months. Soon Josie disliked sleeping alone and started to ask if she could sleep with the boys. Night after night she and Jamie were sharing one twin bed, with their heads at opposite ends. But Josie is a tosser, a turner, and a kicker. Jamie was being pushed out of bed and, again, finding refuge in the master with me. All of this was becoming too much nighttime drama for a pregnant, sleep-craving mama to handle. So it brought me to the decision that a bedroom change was needed.

The change began a few weeks ago.

Step 1: Combine Josie and Jamie’s beds into a single bunk bed set. Not as easy as it sounds! But after a couple trips to the hardware store and with the help of a good friend with some heavy moving and lifting, the beds were sturdily assembled.  Now Josie and Jamie both have their own bed to sleep in, but in close enough proximity to each other to make them happy. In the past few weeks the bunk has proven itself useful in more ways than one. It’s not only a convenient sleeping quarter, but it makes a great play area. I can actually manage to get laundry put away while the kids are happily pretending to be on a tall boat, safe from the bad guys below.

Step 2: Remove the crib and acquire a toddler bed for Johnny. A ten minute search on Craigslist found me a like-new toddler bed with white finish (exactly what I wanted) for only $30. I took the boys with me to Virginia Beach the next day to pick it up and I had the bed put together by bedtime that night. Johnny was more than ready for the transition out of his crib and into his big boy bed. He lays his sweet little head down on his pillow, says “nigh night,” and then pretends to snore “shew.. .shew…” Now, instead of a girl’s room and a boys’ room, we have one big kids’ room.

Step 3: Turn the empty room into a nursery. Now that we had some available space, it seemed only natural to make the extra room into a nursery for Jeremy. I hadn’t planned it this way (we originally assumed we would put Jeremy in the crib in the boys’ room) but now that a nursery was a valid option, I was excited to throw myself into the project. I love a good project! Especially when my husband is gone and I’m looking for distraction, and when I’m twenty-something weeks pregnant and filled with the nesting urge. It was mostly a lot of furniture assembly and re-arrangement with a couple purchases in between. Josie, Jamie, and Johnny all helped in their own ways. Josie stayed up late one night to help me paint the wooden letters to spell Jeremy’s name on the wall. Jamie and Johnny gave the crib mattress a good test with their bouncing. I added my own handiwork by painting a collection of wooden wall plaques with animals to match the new bed set that I picked out. And… viola!

So now we have room for four! I am feeling very happy with the way our new bedrooms came together. The past few nights I have tucked Josie, Jamie, and Johnny into their beds and given each of them a kiss and then I have walked down the hallway and into the nursery. I sit in my glider, glancing around the room, and I can’t believe that in a few short months I will be nursing a tiny newborn boy in that exact same spot. And while I sit there with sweet baby dreams dancing in my head I also listen down the hall at the hushed whispers of the other three kids chatting to each other.  And I can’t help but wonder, “what wild adventures are they plotting?”

Dressed in their PJs before bed