Among my interests is camping.  I adore nature and love getting out and about.  We bought a trailer last year.  Three days before the due date of my second son.  I don’t remember much of the paper-signing – I was pretty worried about giving birth at the dealership.

Needless to say, we’ve quite enjoyed our trailer.  It is a new brand from Keystone called Passport.  It’s an Ultra-lite.  We have a model 240QS.  It means it’s about 26 feet and has a queen bed slide out (the rear).  In the beginning, we thought this was going to be our “step” trailer.  We would use this for a while and step up to another one.  But this one really suits our needs.  It sleeps 8 or 9.  Pretty comfortably.  Not to mention, it has some great “accommodations” as in the toilet, the shower, the fridge, the furnace, the air conditioning, and storage. 

Ok, so back to this weekend.  We had a difficult time following the directions provided by the State’s website.  Lesson learned – mapquest everything! Then they completely melted down as it was bedtime – but the camper wasn’t set up.  It was quite chaotic.

Zach was our main problem.  He enjoys his habits.  He loves routines.  He hated adjusting to a new place to sleep and a new way to go to sleep.  It worked, but we had quite the arguments about it.  And it also involved me sleeping with him in my bed the first night and getting about 4 hours of good sleep.  For the both of us.  I was very tired.  AJ slept like a perfect child.  And he wanted to do all the cool things that a kid likes to do when in a forest.  Go hiking, throwing rocks in the river, going to the playground, more walking.  Oh, did I mention walking?? LOL

We did a lot of walking.  The first day, I had Zach on my back.  He’s a pretty heavy duty kid.  About 26 pounds.  And he had no interest in being in the backpack contraption.  He wanted to walk like his big brother.  But the river was very high and the pathways were pretty slippery.

BUT – it was a great day.  No yelling at the kids to stop hitting each other, no refereeing.  I loved that part of it.  I really was ready to pull my hair out Thursday.  I had to go pick up the trailer and pack and all this other stuff and the boys were on extra-BAD behavior.  You know how it goes -if you have to get something done, the kids DON’T cooperate!!

The second day was just as much walking.  Zach slept better the night before and he was getting used to the drill. 

And then you have to take into consideration our luck on neighbors.  We always get the worst of them.  So, it only comes natural that it applies to our campsites, too.  We had the couple that drank (even though there was an alcohol ban) and chose to play their very bad music very loudly. This is our luck all the time.  We have yet to camp when people are actually respectful of each other.  Most people are – but it’s always the few that ruin the peace of the many.

Then we came home this morning and I had to take AJ to his first child’s birthday party that he was invited to.  He had a blast.  And I did, too.  It was the first time that I had AJ to myself without Zach. I enjoyed paying attention to AJ.  Although he told me he wished Daddy was there.  Broke my heart.  But I’m the mommy – I’ll get over it.