The WAL

Continued from yesterday. 

11. Be able to put batteries in all of the flashlights twice, not including the ones you start with.

This is probably a little excessive for anything less than a week, but kids love flashlights. Batteries drain faster than you expect, even in LEDs.

12. You’re going to miss most of the good pictures. Be happy with the ones you get.

13. Language is no barrier to kids who want to play.

When camping, my kids routinely play with kids from La Belle Province whose English is considerably less than my French. The lack of a common language doesn’t seem to bother any of them at all. Given the freedom to roam, kids gravitate to each other. Not so much a rule as a law of nature.

14. A sleeping bag designed to hold one adult will hold one adult and two small children in a pinch, but don’t expect to be comfortable. And not just during a thunderstorm.

15. There’s always one more mosquito/bite/scratch/bug to catch/wave to smash.

16. Take advantage of programs.

Presqu’ile in particular, and Ontario Parks in general, tend to offer interperative programs both natural and historical. Field trips on tap. We don’t do all of them, but usually hit at least one per day when we’re camping and sometimes on day trips, too.

17. Take pillows. Trust me.

18. Always have a backup plan.

Rain, E-coli, a daughter squirts herself in the eye with mosquito repellant, a son finds the only zebra mussel in the entire region to slice his knee open on. Things happen. Know a little of what’s available in the surrounding community.

Enjoy, and happy camping.

Last month, my wife and I took our three offspring (8, 6, 4) camping for nearly a week at Presqu’ile Provincial Park just south of Brighton, Ontario (a place I can’t say enough good things about - great beach, hiking trails, friendly staff, nature centre, and tons of kid-friendly interpretive programs, natural and historical - if you’re thinking about a camping trip next year, I highly recommend the park). It was our second major camping trip - we did one last year, a day shorter. From these, and a couple of overnights or weekends, I’ve learned a number of things about camping with small, and not so small, children. I intend to apply them on our trip next week to Bon Echo park and thought I’d share.

1. There’s always room for one more bottle of mosquito repellant.

2. Don’t forget the after-bite and calamine.

3. Sunscreen in a spritzer is an amazing invention.

4. Per child, double the number of pairs of underwear you think you need. Add two more.

Accidents happen. Mud happens. Sand happens. Many things happen.

5. Bathing won’t help for long. They’ll be dirty and they’ll stink.

It’s a kid thing. I seem to remember my parents commenting on it when we were kids.

6. Patience. They’re not sleeping enough. Neither are you.

7. There’s no need to eat crap and they’re less picky because they’re always starving.

But be careful. Pizza cooked over an open fire, while delicious, can dry out before the cheese melts if you’re not careful.

8. Make the food fun.

Things on a stick usually go over well and you’d be surprised what you can cook on a stick aside from hot dogs and marshmallows.

9. Sing campfire songs. They love it.

By the time I got to the flea on the feather on the wing on the chick in the egg in the nest on the twig on the branch on the limb on the bough on the tree in the hole in the ground, and the green grass grew all around, all around… they were hysterical.

10. They won’t take their shoes off at least half of the time. The tent will get dirty inside.

Dirt and sand are irritating, but easy to deal with when you’re packing up. I draw the line at mud, though.

The rest tomorrow.

There are two guys at work who have both become father to a second child recently.  Both have arranged several months of parental leave starting shortly and within a month of the child’s birth.  The other day at work, I overheard a conversation between the two converning how much fishing they’re going to get in.  One even commented that it will be nice to have someone to fish with.

Yesterday afternoon before work, I convinced my wife that we should eat dinner in front of the TV so my daughters could finish watching the Powerpuff Girls movie on one of the cartoon channels and I could be with them for something they enjoy (and it was kind of entertaining, if not in the same way as for the girls).  My preference is always to spend time with my kids, alone or in combinations.  Vacation or leave of any sort is family time and leisure activities are planned with family in mind.  (Yes, my wife and I do take some time to ourselves, but not much.  I have plenty of alone time when I’m on night shift and during my commute.  A little more when I’m running.)  And with a newborn, planning activities for myself wasn’t even on the radar.  Bugger off and leave my exhausted wife with the kids to go fishing?  Yeah, right.  She would have been justified in beating me.

It’s a strange contrast.  I wonder, am I the weird one?

A long time ago, before the world wide web, in the middle ages of electronic communication, in the glory days of electronic bulletin board systems, people amused themselves and each other by putting taglines at the bottom of their e-mail. These were sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, sometimes bits of wisdom in 80 characters or less. One of my favourites, that I immediately co-opted into my list of potentials, was “It’s always darkest just before you step on the cat.” I grew up in a house with cats and have always had at least one of my own since I left that house. Currently, there are two wandering around. It’s quite startling to step on a cat in the dark. They assume you can see them because, of course, they can see you, so they don’t move… until you step on them.

But as a parent, there are things I enjoy stepping on in the dark far less than cats. Toy cars, Transformers, Polly Pocket bits, marbles or any other of the seemingly thousands of small pieces of kid stuff lying around the house. But the worst, by far, is Lego. Most pieces of Lego have sharp bits sticking upward no matter what side they’re lying on. Caltrops for unwary parents (the cats can see it). It’s bad enough in socks, but we’re moving into barefoot season (actually, this started some time ago from me – much of my family comes from northern Europe and it’s been plenty warm enough for shorts for weeks now).

My son is a Lego fanatic. In fact, anything that involves building something is cool with him. My daughters enjoy it too, just not to the same obsessive degree. I still like it, too, and aside from the nostalgia factor, it’s a lot cooler than when I was a kid. The point, however, is that there’s always Lego strewn about the house and it’s almost a guarantee to find some on the floor of my son’s room.

So if I have to take some laundry in during the night or if I’m checking on him when he’s sick or if I feel the need to be sure he’s breathing (yes, I know I’m paranoid), I’m stepping into a minefield. And when I manage to set one off, I have to stifle any noise of pain or exclamation I might make. So not only has something sharp just stabbed into the bottom of my foot with all of my weight behind it, I don’t even have the satisfaction of swearing out loud. All of those wonderful stress-relieving, pain-distracting curses are compressed into a series of quiet grunts with my mouth clamped shut as I try not to find another weapon of foot destruction to set my already screaming extremity down on. I then shuffle out of the room without lifting my feet from the floor. By the time I’m far enough away to allow one to slip out, I’m too busy trying to turn on the light so I can check for the trail of gushing blood I’m sure I’ve left.  It’s never there, of course, but damn well feels like it should be.

It’s always darkest just before you step on the Lego.

Don’t get me wrong. I like TV. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) applies, but the 10% that’s left over contains some wonderful and amazing stuff as well as some good news reporting. Some of the 90% can be entertaining, too, but usually only in passing. So yes, I like TV.

But there are times I wish we’d never gotten cable again.

We turned the cable off a few months prior to the birth of our first child (there are three), reasoning that we didn’t need to throw away that fifty dollars per month for something we weren’t going to have time to watch anyway and we’d pick it up (or satellite) again some day when our youngest child was old enough to understand the purpose of advertising. (She’s four and a bit now, and has a loose grasp because we’ve explained it, but it doesn’t stop her from asking for things she sees in commercials. Her older sister has a solid understanding of what advertising is for, but that doesn’t stop her from asking for things, either. Their older brother is just a little more subtle about it. “Wow! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it, Dad?”)

We turned it back on a couple of months ago and there are days I wish we hadn’t. Today is one of those days.

I do like TV, but my kids like it a lot more. Too much. We regulate a bit so that they’re not always in front of the mind-sucking box and that helps sometimes. But really, it isn’t so much that they like TV too much, it’s that they talk about it too much.

They talk about their favourite TV show. They talk about the TV show they just watched. They talk about the TV show they’re about to watch. They talk about their favourite part of the movie they saw on TV last week. They talk about the cool TV show that’s going to be on next week. They talk about the segment of the TV show they’ve just watched while the commercial is on. They talk about the commercial they just saw while the TV show is on. They talk about TV shows they’re not allowed to watch. They talk about TV shows they’ve never seen. They sing along with theme songs, with commercials. They sing theme songs and commercials in the yard, in the van, in the bath, while not watching TV, while watching other things on TV. They quote lines from TV shows, from movies they’ve seen on TV, from commercials. Over and over and over and over and over and…

Let’s just say they talk about TV.

And let’s also say that today is one of the days I regret cable, even though they didn’t actually watch much TV. Today.