Ok, I’ll admit it, I sometimes can be frugal, tight, -- oh, alright – cheap. So, as I have been preparing for the big camping trip in the spring, I came across several times in several books a bit of good advice. During my marathon readings at various bookstores, I read that when camping with children, you should do it in stages.

So I began stage one, camp inside. We cleared out a space in our basement, and set up the tent. This outing doesn’t help us to determine how well the tent keeps out rain, but we did test it’s limit on capacity. H-G, Joshua, Caleb, and I settled down to what turned out to be a long night of tossing and turning. Concrete floors convinced me of the wise investment in an air mattress. We turned out all the lights, turned on our “indoor lantern,” flashlights, put in Air Bud in the VCR/TV, and went “camping.”

When the movie was over, and we all started to really go to sleep, Joshua jumped up and said, “I’m going to sleep in my bed” and there was no convincing him otherwise. H-G was all over the place, all night, and Caleb snored light a freight train. The next day, I even felt like I was hit, by freight train.

Ok, enough complaining – I had a fun experience with my kids, and now that it’s all over, I did pick up a couple of things that I had not thought about to prepare for the trip. For example, I don’t believe there will be a TV in the campground, so I will need some ideas to fill some time (especially if it rains and we are trapped in the tent.)