Here's How We City Folk Do It

Don't have the time or inclination to take your kid camping? Here's what you do:

1. Send your husband to the sporting goods store to buy the biggest, most obnoxious tent he can find.

2. Invite your kid's best friends, whose parents also happen to be your best friends, for an outdoor sleepover.

3. Get the kids all sugared up on smores and let them run around the backyard like a pack of wild animals. Your neighbors can live with the annoyance for just one night. (After all, you have to put up with their teenage kid and his garage band. Or the dog barking at all hours of the night. Or the girl next door, sitting out on the deck, recounting her *awesome* date last night. And it did sound awesome, if I was 24 again.)

4. Put the kids to sleep then let the adults drink lots of beer by the fire pit. Or if they prefer, play video games until the wee hours of the night.

5. Make the dads sleep outside with the kids while the mamas sleep on the cozy beds inside the house.

6. Make a hardy breakfast, preferably using cast iron skillets to get the full effect. Then send everyone home exhausted and declare the end of the camping season!

The instructions were basically useless. Or maybe they were wonderfully written and it was the user that was the problem?

It only took about an hour or so to put up the tent. And there was a minimum amount of cussing.

Just so you can get an idea how big our tent was. Everyone just ended up sleeping in ours.

Little angels. An hour earlier they were little devils.

No, that's not a woman with a beard! It's a tired daddy, who stayed up until 3:30AM playing video games. The first kid woke up at 6:15AM. HAHA.

Try getting 5 kids to sit still so you can take a picture. It is impossible.