Camping

Last weekend, my family went camping. It was one of those amazing experiences that I'll never forget and never want to repeat in my entire life.

We hadn't been at the campsite for more than an hour when Cortlen fell into a nearby stream, thus soaking his only pair of shoes.

"My feet are wet!" he reminded us every five minutes for the rest of our trip.

"All I want in life to is ride a horse," announced my daughter an equal number of times. Somehow she got it into her head that we were going to a dude ranch. You can imagine her disappointment when we pulled into a largely deserted state park instead.

While I was trying to talk my kids off the ledge, my husband set up the tent.

Which was considerably smaller than I remembered.

Before turning in the for the night, I suggested that we sing some campfire songs.

The only ones that my kids were interested in singing had to do with beans and farts.

"Fantastic," my husband grumbled.

The only successful part of the trip was dinner, which I purchased at Subway before leaving.

"The only thing that would make this more awesome is a thunderstorm," I whispered to my husband at around midnight. All six of us were smushed together like sardines.

We didn't get that, but we did get a three year-old who coughed in his sleep the whole night.

Around 3am, I officially started to hate myself.

"That was soooooo much fun!" squealed my kids on the drive home.

I snapped my head around the headrest. "Are you serious?"

Insanely enough, they were. They liked camping so much, they insisted, that they want to do it again next weekend.

The odds of that happening are exactly 0%, but my kids' response to the trip from Hades is another reminder that sometimes our view of the world is very different--and often a whole lot worse--than that of our offspring.