Sleeping in a tent, like a boss.

So! Camping. Hey, remember last summer when we took Eleanor camping and she was excellent at it until night fell and then she was totally terrible? And we ended up packing everything into the car in the dark hours and driving home for the night? REMEMBER THAT?

It looked like this.

So, I really wanted to camp for several days this time. Like, two, even. I wanted to wake up in the tent and go make camping coffee over the fire and eat campfire skillet. I wanted to come home smelling like campfire and with melted marshmallow over everything. I wanted to camp.

And Eleanor is the type of person who likes to know what everything is and what it's called and what it is used for. I'm realizing that a lot of parenting is just knowing your child's personality and WORKING with it. So we checked out a bunch of books about camping and talked a lot about sleeping bags and tents. And she practiced.

She practiced rolling around in her sleeping bag and getting used to the texture, and then practiced actually SLEEPING in it, and then practiced sleeping in it IN her camping bed.

By the time we got to Waskesiu and set up the tent, she was so jazzed on the idea that for the first half hour of her first nap, all we could hear from outside the tent was 'Sleep a TENT! Sleep a SLEEPING BAG! Sleep a LI'L BED!' And then finally, silence.

So that part went well. She slept like a tank until almost seven every morning, sleeping right through our coming into the tent once the fire died down, and leaving the tent in the dark hours to go pee, and coming back into the tent. Coming and going from a tent is such a noisy business.

She even slept through the baby in the campsite next to ours that cried every 20 minutes between 8 and midnight, and then again between 4 and 7. She slept through the family of ratty, ill-behaved children that replaced the crying baby on the second night, children who wouldn't stop shooting their laser guns right by our tent, children whose mother kept threatening to take them straight home and then NOT DOING SO until Joel and I stopped getting our hopes up.

And then she'd wake up in the morning, fresh as a daisy, and stand up in her crib all, I see you! Like, how hilarious, here you two are in my room, still sleeping. Let's get up now, I have rocks to collect.