THE PEANUT GALLERY: The Great Outdoors

On paper, or blog site, it sounds like a good idea. Make a lasting memory and have a little summer fun at a relatively low cost. I'm talking about going camping... in the backyard. Not this:

This looks horrible

More like this:

Classic movie.

You see, we are not camping people. We are indoor plumbing, air conditioning, how-many-thread-counts-are-those-sheets people. Problem is, our bank account does not match our vacation desires. Especially after we broke the bank to take Peanut to Disney this past spring. So I kept talking up sleeping in the tent in the backyard. At first, Peanut wanted no part of it. (THAT's my girl.) Then she saw the tent after we had set it up for a play date, and quickly changed her tune:

$50 at Target. You can't beat that.

Now she's all-in, asking almost nightly, "Can we sleep in the tent tonight, daddy?" My "No it's raining/too hot/a school night" excuses were wearing thin. Then she popped the question again as we were eating S'mores one Saturday night. I was out of excuses. Up went the tent and in went the family:

Camping buddies

Don't give your child a flashlight. You'll go blind.

Hours of amusement

We told scary stories of a werewolf preying on an innocent family camping in their backyard:

Vicious werewolf

To make this as authentic as possible, Peanut and I were complaining so much about mosquitoes you'd think we were in the jungle. Once Peanut finally got to sleep, around 10pm, My Director and I turned in as well. But she didn't last long. My Director actually WENT INSIDE about an hour later, grumbling something about sleeping on a tree root. (Read: we're thread-count people.) To make matters worse, she slept on the couch out of - get this - solidarity. "I didn't feel right going upstairs by myself," she'd say. Such a martyr. But Peanut and I toughed it out, with our guard dog, who was unable to escape:

Not amused in the least

A little before five in the morning, I heard a light pattering on the nylon of the tent. As I dozed back to sleep, I thought to myself, "That's nice. I love a nice rainstorm on a summer morning." Wait... what? My eyes burst open and I darted out of the tent like I was shot out of a cannon because I suddenly realized, "HOLY SH!T WE'RE SLEEPING OUTSIDE AND IT'S RAINING."

I scrambled to put the cover over the tent. And as a testament to Peanut's ability to sleep through a battle of the marching bands, she didn't budge. But now I'm awake. And shortly thereafter, so was Peanut.

Peanut (and Lammie) ready to go bright and early

It was 5:30am. I had so many plans for this day. I thought I'd go for a run, be productive in the yard. But not after that night's zero-thread-count sleep. So we did what any sane parents would do. We lathered her with sunscreen and took her to a splash park in a nearby town. 

She directs too.

Refuses to go all the way in.

She did it!
But doesn't like getting her face wet.

She gets her dance moves from me.

Forty-five minutes of playing tag in the water and Peanut was finally toasted, if you will. Lunch and nap soon followed. For Peanut and mommy and daddy. A nap, in our comfortable beds. Where we belong. But Peanut keeps asking when we're going to sleep in the tent again. In my effort to avoid committing, I keep giving her a vague "soon." It'll definitely be before we go back to Disney. You can't beat the price.

Maybe Peanut was getting her revenge for the sleep-deprived torture we put here through in Disney. You can read about that here.